


Revolutionary Etude

by Ololon



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Drama, M/M, Mystery, Slash, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 40
Words: 65,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ololon/pseuds/Ololon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-series end, Julian is living on Cardassia and in a relationship with Garak, and their future seems assured. But a chance encounter with a former Cardassian dissident leaves Julian wondering if he ever really knew Garak at all...and may jeopardise both their futures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An everyday coincidence

**Author's Note:**

> AKA the fic that took me seven years to write. Yes really (28/08/05 til 27/08/05). It's written, but needs tidying, however I should update regularly. It started with a crazy idea that just wouldn't let me go until I somehow made it work. I'm not sure I succeeded, but I'll let you be the judge. Any comments would be really appreciated; I put my heart into this over a long time. Even if they're "you're bonkers and this makes no sense" :P
> 
> This goes to dark places, hence the warnings and ratings, but is not seriously explicit. I rate violence more heavily than sex.
> 
> I am taking the events of A Stitch in Time by Andrew Robinson as canon, and explore his idea of Cardassians having a "circular" memory to quite a degree. Different sections alternate between Julian present-day POV, and Garak past POV, plus a few others. I've kept a section per chapter to try and keep it clear for people, although this does mean chapters will be wildly different lengths. Hopefully it will make sense.
> 
> Please note that names of the different parts are taken from Iain M Banks book titles, and the chapter headings usually from song titles or DS9 quotes. I will provide a full appendix for the sources of quotations at the ends, plus some explanations, if people are really interested.
> 
> Nominally a sequel to my other fic "What You Come Back To," but you don't need to have read that, to read this.

**_A lie told often enough becomes the truth –_ ** **Lenin**

**_You should never tell the same lie twice –_ ** **Garak.**

** Revolutionary Etude **

****

**Introduction: Surface Detail**

****

**Chapter 1:** **_An everyday coincidence_ **

_‘’Foreign places yield more to one who is himself worth meeting’ –_ Beowulf.

****

Dr Julian Bashir made his way distractedly through the pressing throng in the Central Plaza, heading out towards East Quarter, and the house he shared with Elim Garak. With any luck, his erstwhile friend and lover, sometime advisor to the provisional government, would be there already waiting for him, hopefully with good news concerning his formal application for parliamentary candidacy. He quickened his pace slightly, anticipation rising again (he muttered a few stern words to ‘anticipation’ under his breath and told it to stop being so impatient and disgraceful in public).

He soon left the crowds behind and slipped into the quieter residential streets. Rare it was to see a crowd at all; a heartening sign of Cardassia’s slow but sure recovery. Although Garak would grumble. He smiled to himself.

Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t see the woman stepping out of the pharmacy on the corner until it was too late, and collided gracelessly with her.

“I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, contrite, helping her up. She ducked her head in embarrassment.

“No, it was my fault,” she protested demurely, “I should have been looking where I was going.” She looked up and he found himself fixed with a frankly assessing, though friendly, gaze that produced an insistent tug of memory.

“It’s Dr Bashir, isn’t it?” she questioned, tilting her head to one side slightly.

“Professor Lang,” he remembered at last, and she smiled. He smiled back. “I’m glad to see you well,” he ventured, “I know many dissidents didn’t escape both the Central Command and the Dominion.” A shadow crossed her smile; she had a striking face, but, like so many, it bore its marks of grief and strife.

“That’s true. Rikellen and Hoag, for example.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, sincerely.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, then her mood brightened, “Still, Cardassia is at last free, and we can hope for the best from this new democracy…speaking of which, I hear your…friend, Mr Garak, is running for office.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, surprised she knew, “To be honest, I don’t know if he’ll succeed, given his past and connections with the old establishment.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Lang said confidently, “Hardly anybody on Cardassia can claim a stain-free past, and he _did_ play a key role in bringing down the Dominion, after all.

“Well, I hope so,” Bashir replied, heartened – and a little intrigued – by her friendly attitude. She squeezed his arm suddenly.

“I told all my students at the university that I’d be voting for him,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye that showed some of the spirit of the young woman she must once have been, “Of course, I’m biased, for he _did_ save my life.” Bashir stopped dead, struck dumb, and stared at her. She laughed again. “Oh, didn’t he tell you about that?”

“No, not exactly,” Bashir replied drily. An idea struck him. “But I’d love to hear all about it. Would you care to get a drink?” She seemed to hesitate a moment, then,

“Yes, why not?”

#

Julian stepped quietly over the threshold of their house, mind awhirl and abuzz with what he’d learned from Professor Lang. Garak was waiting for him. He’d been reading, but when he saw Julian, put the book down and rose in one smooth motion, crossing over to Julian and greeting him with an affectionate smile and warm embrace, which Julian returned enthusiastically.

“I thought you would be home an hour ago,” Garak chided gently, “You’ve forced me to read dreadful human literature for all that time.” A sidelong glance, a twinkle in the eye, “Now was that a deliberate ploy on your part, I wonder?” Julian chuckled.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he replied, with whimsical insincerity, “I bumped into this intriguing and attractive woman.”

“Attractive, was she?” Garak murmured, lighting little kisses across Julian’s face; Julian was struggling to take his boots off at the same time. “I see I’m going to have to escort you everywhere if you’re going to be so distracted by every pretty woman that happens to cross your path.” The kisses reached Julian’s mouth.

“Actually, she was an old friend of yours, well, sort of,” Julian told him, pulling away a moment.

“Oh?” Garak sounded mildly interested, though clearly, by the roving exploration of his hands, not as interested as he was in other things. Bashir dropped his bombshell.

“Yes, Professor Lang.” It was only for the slightest moment, but he felt Garak pause, motionless, before resuming his attentions. Hands slipped in his coat and slipped it off in a swift, lazy gesture.

“I think you’ll find she’s more an old friend of Quark’s,” Garak countered, the merest trace of amusement in his tone.

“Yes, I did tell her he was still running the bar on DS9 and would appreciate a call.” Garak gave a throaty chuckle.

“Really my dear, you’re becoming an even more shameless matchmaker than Lieutenant Dax.”

“You must have brought out the romantic in me,” Julian said, smugly.

“I suspect it’s more the other way around,” Garak replied with a slight smile, before stealing another kiss. His hands were wandering in earnest now, though unhurried as ever, his eyes heated. “I’m certainly feeling romantic now,” he added, snaking his hands under Julian’s shirt and grazing his fingertips across his nipples, causing their owner to gasp involuntarily.

“This isn’t romance, it’s lechery!” Julian retorted, laughing.

“I’d gladly promote it to buggery,” Garak whispered in his ear, sending a shiver down his spine.

“Elim,” he protested, despite himself, and fending him off with some difficulty. Garak looked at him, amusement and desire salient in those steady blue eyes.

“How uncharacteristically coy you are tonight,” he observed, clearly knowing exactly why.

“I was wondering why you helped her escape,” Julian said, trying to sound as if it was an innocuous question, and wishing he’d found a more subtle way to frame it. Garak seldom appreciated the direct approach, well, not with questions anyway. “I didn’t think you had dissident sympathies,” he added, deliberately outrageous, and was rewarded with a bark of surprised laughter.

“I don’t – well, didn’t – if you excuse the fact that I’m now applying to work for the government they helped bring into existence.” He was advancing minutely upon Bashir again.

“Oh gosh, I forgot to ask, how did it go today?” Julian asked abruptly, feeling a twinge of chagrin that he hadn’t asked straightaway.

“Oh, all right,” Garak replied, disinterestedly, “I cleared the preliminaries.”

“Elim, that’s wonderful!” Julian exclaimed, delighted. “We should do something to celebrate.”

“Oh believe me, I’m trying,” Garak said, heavily ironic, and closing in again. Clearly Natima Lang had already been dismissed from his mind as a matter of no consequence.

“Lechery,” Bashir accused, teasing, and grinning nonetheless.

“Oh, can’t we just call it exercise? You approve of that, I recall.” He was pulled in for a lingering, demanding kiss. Damn the man, but he was too good at this.

“So you weren’t secretly a dissident then?” he inquired nonchalantly, a last-ditch effort. Another derisive laugh.

“My dear doctor, you really _do_ have an overactive imagination!” The eyes were dancing with merriment, and, for that one moment, it was as if Julian was seeing him as he first had over ten years ago; closed-off and inscrutable. Then the affection came flooding back; that incongruous openness of feeling he had never quite been able to resist, and he was seized in another passionate embrace. “Come now, Julian, put those creative talents of yours to better use,” Elim murmured enticingly in his ear, and really, it did seem terribly silly now that he thought about it again. All consideration of his carefully martialled questions flew from his head; all the threads of his argument picked neatly apart before he had even voiced them, by those nimble fingers unravelling him so dexterously from his clothes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recently edited to correct a few typos and misattributed quote!


	2. Waiting Phase 1

**Chapter 2: Waiting phase I**

Garak lay awake, staring at the ceiling, in the dark. He wasn’t the only one unable to sleep, despite the tingling in his limbs, pleasant aftermath. He could just hear Julian padding about downstairs, barefooted. Pacing. Thinking. Pondering. That insatiable intellect turning over and over its latest infatuation. If only there were some particularly intractable virus to snag its attention, he thought, ruefully.

He hadn’t succeeded then. No, clearly, he had failed. Somehow, Julian had seen through him, and was even now down there producing possible answers to his own questions. He wondered, idly, at what point he had become quite so transparent, but he had known, too, that the more he had let Julian see of him – that he couldn’t quite stop himself from doing – the harder it would become to hide himself when he wanted to; even, when it was necessary to do so.

He pondered that a little. Was it really necessary, and why did he want to so badly? Perhaps, it was just force of habit. And yet, he’d rather thought it was a habit Julian had been slowly weaning him off.

Memory! How its manifold layers seamed themselves so effortlessly with the present, oft belying the discordancy that underlay them. Little did Julian know what disharmony he had wakened, that was now sounding loudly in his mind. He had known that, someday, this was bound to happen. The circular nature of Cardassian memory meant that things put behind oneself…sometimes ended up back in front of you again. He wondered whether Julian would be angry with him for leaving certain details out of the account of his life he’d sent to the doctor; those fateful few months. He wondered if Julian could ever have reached such a hopelessly romantic conclusion if he’d known just how dark his misdeeds were. He wondered if he’d understand.

How clearly the image came to him now: Julian, in his quarters, desperately trying to help, too stubborn to be pushed away, almost as infuriating as the pain behind his eyes. Almost, but not quite.

 _It’s some sort of torture device isn’t it?_ And he’d had to laugh, even through the agony. Yes, that was what it had become.

 _The whole point of it was to make me **immune** to torture, doctor. _Yes, it was ironic, as he’d said. He hadn’t lied then, he hadn’t – but he knew that Julian would take the wrong truth from it. After all, the best lie you can tell, is the one you get the other person to tell for you.

Perhaps, if he’d known that, Julian would have understood.


	3. Barbarism begins at home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for torture...this gets rather dark rather quickly...it's Tain's fault. It's about as dark as the fic gets though, so hang on in there :)

** Part I: Against A Dark Background **

 

**Ch.3: Barbarism begins at home**

_“Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds” – Tennyson, Boadicea._

“Tain?”

I stepped cautiously into the gloomy office – Tain’s private domain; somber drapes, weighty bronze casts on the solid dark furniture; small, pale and neatly geometric abstracts upon the sober walls – not his Order premises. There was a kotra board on a small side table in the corner, a game apparently in progress, which surprised me: Tain had never been one for kotra. “You wanted to see me?” I was both hopeful and puzzled. I had graduated from the Obsidian Order training academy the top of my class and spent a year as a Level Three interrogator at command headquarters. I had worked diligently and effectively, but I was hopeful of a more exciting assignment now that my probationary year was finished. Most of my compatriots had already received their instructions; I was reasonably certain that I was the only one to be summoned for a personal meeting.

Tain looked up from his papers, eyes as piercing and cold as ever they had been. I quelled the childish itch that always made me want to fidget under the scrutiny; that would never do.

“Do you know what I always appreciated about you Elim?” Tain asked abruptly, wasting no time on pleasantries. For a fleeting instant I toyed with a bantering reply, but Tain had little indulgence for such games when he was in business mode.

“No,” I said instead, simply.

“Hmm!” Tain seemed amused, then gave me a keen glance from under lowered eyelids. “You keep an open mind,” he told me, disarmingly frank. “It’s what makes you such a good interrogator; a superior class of operative. Too many interrogators go into a session with their minds already made up. They want the right answers, which are always want they want to hear; you only want the right answers.” This time I couldn’t resist.

“Are you saying I seek only the truth?” I asked, considerably more drolly than I actually felt. Tain considered me a brief moment.

“I’m saying that of all the interrogators I currently have in the Order, you are the only one with a false confession rate of zero.”

“I take great pride in my work,” I admitted, cautiously. I still had no idea where this was going.

“I know. You’re a professional. Something of a perfectionist too. I know it’s usual for a trainee to be reassigned to a different field after the first year, but it would seem foolish not to explore your talent for interrogation further. I’m promoting you to Level One interrogations. You will receive your instructions shortly.” I got up, bowing my head in acknowledgement.

“Thank you,” I said, fervently, “I won’t disappoint you.” Tain made no reply to that; he was already looking at the next item on his desk. I ran down the stairs with my chest swelling with pride. Nobody got sent up to Level One that quickly. Level _Two_ was highly classified; Level One was both highly classified, and the most technically demanding. So I was naturally honoured – flattered, even – when Tain told me my new assignment. It meant that I was doing an excellent job. It meant that I was privileged enough that the information I would extract would be that known only to Tain’s most prized and qualified agents. It meant that Tain trusted me. It is ironic, is it not, that I could once be blessed with the same naivety I have so often accused the doctor of. Or perhaps it was ego, to believe that this was a sign of favour, or, even more pathetically, that the approval I craved from him had been in some measure received.

No. Tain did what he did for the reasons he always did; because at some level I had yet to recognise, I hadn’t been good enough, and because it tightened his grip on me. After all, torture is not about pain: it is about control.

 

Do not believe what the Bajorans tell you. Do not believe the things you have heard about the Obsidian Order, the tales we tell to frighten the children into good behaviour. I had been a Level Three interrogator, and by interrogator, I mean interrogator. No more than hard questioning. No more than a little judicious application of fear. I was not then a torturer. Now I was to become one, or, as the correct terminology was, a Level One interrogator. The Obsidian Order, under Tain’s direction, was an almost obsessively tidy operation. There was no needless waste. Do not believe the things you have heard, the tales of horror more befitting the Dark Ages of the Human’s past. Nothing was done without need. Nothing was done to excess. We did not, like the military, charge in with heavy-handed techniques when only a light touch was required. Why use a hammer to kill a fly? L1 was reserved for the hard cases, the nuts that wouldn’t crack; the bad cases, those suspected of the most serious of crimes; the urgent cases, where speed was of the essence. I thought nothing of the means or the morality. As an agent of the Obsidian Order, I served Cardassia, and whatever means were necessary or expedient to further that end, _had_ moral authority.

My first session, really a test case with some miserable little dishonest military clerk, more full of leaks than a Ferengi garbage scow, was a disaster. I cracked after only a few minutes, when hardly any pressure had been applied. I found it…distasteful. I’d had him hung in a stress position for a few hours, and simply walking into the cell made my own shoulders ache. Thinking perhaps that I might be able to retain a more professional detachment if I were not the one getting my hands dirty, I directed the assistants to do it for me. A few small electric shocks, what could be simpler? Every jolt sent an answering one through me, or so it seemed. I persevered, but eventually had to leave to be sick. He was a despicable traitor, and a coward to boot, who started spilling everything, implicating his own family in the process, so it was not as if I failed. But I felt that I had. I had felt sorry for him regardless.

“Not an uncommon reaction at first,” Tain dismissed it, “You’ll get used to it. Maintain your detachment.” But I did not. I could not. After three weeks I was ready to give up and admit my failings. I pushed myself through the interrogations. I made myself do it. I attended desensitisation sessions to try and improve my constitution, but I could not. I tried drinking beforehand, but it only dulled my wits and when Mila caught me at it she broke the bottle upon the floor and cursed me for a fool, seemingly genuinely afraid that Tain would throw me out if he found it. She was right, of course; it was completely unprofessional, and Tain would not tolerate it, but I was desperate, and I could not understand why I could not detach. I had already killed, after all, but this was something else. This was too close, too personal, and it was not over in a few brief seconds. Lying helped, as did, occasionally, telling the truth. I had some moderate success with a few cases by convincing them I desperately wished not to do what I had to do, how terrible it would be for them, and if they only capitulated and confessed now it would spare them the worst of their punishment. But getting them to confess through pleading was losing control of the situation, and it only worked with the particularly frightened or sensitive. Humiliated, I eventually made my way to Tain to make my own admission of failure. He seemed surprisingly calm.

“I rather thought you might get into difficulty at this level,” he remarked, casually, and I clamped down a swift surge of anger. He offered me a glass of kanaar, and I was instantly sure he had known about the drinking. I declined, and he merely shrugged and topped up his own. “You’re a sensitive fellow, Elim.” Conversationally, with no accusation in his tone. “Mila’s made you soft, of course, but we can iron that out. No, it’s your overactive imagination that’s at the core of it.” My bewilderment must have been plain on my face. “You empathise too much,” Tain expanded, with a slight wave of his glass, indicating my usual seat. I sat down cautiously.

“I tried to detach, but I couldn’t,” I admitted. Tain considered this briefly.

“In another, I would take that as a flaw. Of course it’s a flaw in you now, but before we moved you to Level One it was an advantage.” He settled back in his chair, clearly turning his words over in his mind. Tain was always careful when expounding one of his lessons. He was, in truth, the best of my teachers. He let me make the mistake, he taught me the lesson, then he let me show that I had learned from it. I hoped that this time would be no different.

“Do you know how our ancestors used to hunt, at the dawn of our race?” was his unexpected opening.

“No.”

“They pursued the prey that nothing else could catch, in the heat of the day, when nothing else dared move, and they caught it because they knew what it would do; which way it would run, which way it thought safety lay; where, in its desperation, it would hide. And they could follow it, even though it left no tracks in the sand, because they already knew which way it would go. They knew its mind. They felt its terrors and pains as if they were their own, and this enabled them to predict its behaviour. And it is said that, because of this, when they finally caught and killed it, they wept for it.” I stared, and he chuckled. “Oh, that last bit is a piece of Hebitian romantic nonsense, of course, but the point is a salient one. You pursue so effectively, my dear Elim, not because you detach yourself and seek objectivity, but because you use that vivid imagination of yours to get into the mind of your prey; to think what they think, to predict what they will do, or have done. To catch them. But you cannot think what they think without also feeling what they feel, and now you feel their pain a little too keenly as your own, do you not?” I could only nod.

“I had hoped a little exposure might create the necessary separation between the two, but it seems that’s not to be.”

“Will you take me off Level One then?”

“That is one possibility. The second is that we teach you detachment, but that will blunt your imagination, and thus limit your usefulness in a different way.”

“Is there nothing else I can try?” I was profoundly unhappy. Tain actually smiled indulgently at me. One might have believed it sympathy, but _his_ brain did not work that way; certainly it didn’t now, if it ever had. I wondered, not for the first time, if he had ever been like me.

“There is a third possibility. There is a device; a neural implant. It was originally devised to enable subjects to resist torture, which would be an added benefit, of course. Would you consider this?”

“I will do whatever it takes to the perform to the best of my ability, you know that. But if it’s supposed to help me resist torture, how is it supposed to help me _conduct_ torture?”

“It will take away your pain.”

 

It took me a few weeks to recover from the operation, which was an exceedingly delicate one; a few more for the technicians to make the necessary adjustments to the settings, which involved some rather unpleasant tests. When I got back, Tain conducted his own tests, which were far worse, and changed the settings himself. It was, therefore, some time before I was put back on interrogations again, and I was by this time exceedingly anxious about the whole business.

How clearly I remember that first post-implant torture session. The grinding sense of unease and discomfort grew as we progressed up the severity levels, and I gritted my teeth. He was a glinn; young, handsome and immensely confident. He had been sleep deprived, humiliated, disoriented with strobe lights and white noise, rendered confused by cold and dehydration; and yet he retained a certain presence of mind that I swiftly diagnosed as a misplaced sense of integrity coupled with military discipline. We progressed to an electric shock collar, for I was mindful of both of the time it was taking and my own pressing anxiety.

At the precise level at which the pain was finally revealed in his face and his agonised cry, the implant delivered its own electric bolt straight to my brainstem and pleasure washed over me like a wave, taking away the sting and the terrible taste in my mouth, drowning the protest in my mind. Whether by its own design or Tain’s alterations, the machinery of the implant made no distinction when those parts of my brain were stimulated by my own pain or by the reflection of another’s. The glinn endured the pain too. He talked, of course – everybody talks – but he did not tell me what I wished to know.

I staged a mock execution, and he lifted his head with pride, refusing to talk except to make some absurd speech about how he was willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Before, I would have been so frustrated I would have slapped him, but now only a strange, calm clarity remained. He did not fear pain and he did not fear death. He believed in his own righteousness. Really, he was terribly arrogant man for one so young; I wondered from whence such over-confidence had been born.

When I came back I ordered an array of surgical equipment laid out upon a side table, raising querying looks from the technicians, who doubtless thought this rather…old-fashioned, shall we say. They changed their mind when I but lightly slashed a scalpel across his face; no worse a cut than he could get in a brawl. But when I turned to the table again, as if to pick up something worse, he suddenly began to talk; really talk, this time. Never underestimate the power of vanity. He could face death but not disfigurement. Tain was pleased; I was triumphant, but kept it to myself. I did not want to commit my own sin of hubris; and besides, what really lingered in the mind was the pleasure.

Tain’s relentless honing of the razor edge of my loyalty and my talent made a sadist of me in the end. When the subject first began to writhe in pain and that part of me that was soft keened in protesting empathy, the implant drowned it in pleasure, until the association of another’s pain with my own pleasure became imprinted indelibly upon me. It did not matter; I excelled at my profession, and I revelled in it. All parts of my mind were in perfect accord; I served Cardassia, and it gave me joy to do so. I was exquisitely and perfectly happy; I needed nothing more in my life than this, but of this, I needed more. The connection of leather and metal on tender flesh, the jolt of the electrodes, chorus of screams, all merged into a beautiful symphony of pain in my mind. Tain was forced to rein in my enthusiasm on more than one occasion; but he did not rein in _me_ , because I was very, very good at what I did. I was the best, and I got results. There was no more successful interrogator at the Order than I.

Of course, after a time, it stopped working. The anticipation of the pleasure began to overrule any sense of empathic pain I might once have felt. I no longer cared that my subjects suffered, not even on a subconscious level. I howled in the frustration of my burgeoning addiction; Tain was merciless, and ordered the settings dialled down, but by then it’s job had been done. The empathy was gone but the imagination remained. I had at last become the perfect torturer.

So you see, I could not understand why it was then that Tain pulled me off interrogations, and summoned me for reassignment.


	4. The Essence of Intellect

‘ _It is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself’ –_ Francis Bacon: Of Truth (Essays).

 

Garak had eventually fallen asleep; at least he was asleep when Julian at last came back to bed himself, and was still sleeping when he rose early to go to work. In itself, this wasn’t so atypical; Julian found the full heat of the Cardassian afternoon oppressively ennervating, and tended to work in two shifts, early in the morning and the evening, and return home for a siesta in the afternoon.

Not this afternoon. This afternoon he had some investigation to do. His calls to Colonel Kira and Quark, however, did not prove as informative as he had anticipated. He was nevertheless undeterred, and had hopes that the line of investigation he was following up on Cardassia would be more fruitful. Of course, it would all be a lot easier if Garak would simply _tell_ him; unlikely, but worth a try. He didn’t stop to question why this was becoming important to him; he wasn’t aware, quite, that it _was_ important to him. It was important, however, and howsoever the man tried to hide it, to Garak. 

He had persuaded Elim that it would be a good idea for him to become an advisor to the provisional government on foreign affairs. After all, Garak had spent a substantial amount of time on a Federation-run Bajoran space station, and dealt regularly with all manner of races. He had demonstrated a far greater understanding of alien cultures than a lot of Cardassians Bashir had met. It would be perfect too; they could travel – Garak liked travel too, didn’t he? Whilst the position had been unofficial, small-scale, there had been no problem, but now that things were becoming a little more stable and less cobbled-together, Cardassia wanted to do things properly, and that meant appointing people who had not only ability, but also credibility and integrity. Garak’s chequered past was causing questions to be raised. However great his part in the war against the Dominion and the liberation of Cardassia, the fact remained – and was by now common gossip if not quite common knowledge (much to Garak’s disgust) – that he was a former Obsidian Order agent and interrogator. The new Cardassia didn’t want anyone with links to the old regime or bloodstained hands working for the government. Bashir could sympathise with this viewpoint, indeed, he found it laudable, but did they have to be so damned pedantic about it? Not everything was that clearcut, and he was sure most of the criticism was directed from rival parties, and was born more out of petty spite than virtue. And anyway, well, it was _Garak_ , and if they only knew him like he did (well, maybe not _quite_ like he did) then they’d understand and they’d know that he would only, always, do what was best for Cardassia. That was one thing that had never changed. Dr Parmak supported them after all; in fact, it had been his idea in the first place, and if he didn’t hold Garak’s past against him, he didn’t see why a bunch of rowdy politicians who’d never even met him until after the war should either.

When Garak came home that evening, it was with an extra tunic slung over his arm.

“Hello my dear,” he greeted Julian warmly enough, with a kiss and embrace as always, although Julian thought he sensed a guarded look in his eyes. Then he gestured in irritation at the tunic.

“Can you believe Dr Parmak tore his sleeve again? The man shouldn’t be let out dressed, it’s just a waste!”

“I recall you said that about me once.” Garak gave him a sly look. 

“But that, my dear, was for an entirely more congenial reason.” Julian smothered a laugh. It had to be said that Garak’s jobs since returning to Cardassia had been as varied as those he’d had before – and also the same. He’d helped out the medical and burial teams, as everyone had, initially. Then food and aid distribution; he’d even assisted in running the orphanage that Bashir and Parmak had unofficially set up. Increasingly, however, as the immediate crisis passed, Garak found that the local people were coming to him with all their clothing needs.

“Can you believe it?” he’d complained, in total (if exaggerated) exasperation one day. “After all this time, all these years of exile, what do I get when I return? Friends and relations alike all dead, house in ruins, _world_ in ruins – but now I’m bombarded by an endless swathe of tattered rags! I finally have charge of my own destiny, and I find that I’m still stuck as a wretched _tailor!_ ” It was really too funny, and he knew Garak thought so too, in spite of his complaining. There was less and less time for it now though, with his new duties, and he had begun to cut back to just his more favoured customers, then just favours for friends.

“How did it go today?” Julian asked. 

“Not particularly well,” Garak admitted. “The council of ministers seems keen on interrogating me at every opportunity, and a poor job they make of it too. Frankly, I don’t know why they’re bothering. Even if they wish to incriminate me in some fashion, there’s really nothing substantial they can use as evidence. Of course, neither can my supporters, not for anything before the war, anyway. I suppose they simply wish to raise enough questions and stir up enough rumours to discredit me.” Julian frowned. Not such good news.

“It would be nice if we could raise enough questions ourselves to have the opposite effect,” he ventured carefully. Garak dumped the tunic and was intent upon a kiss, which Bashir side-stepped, wanting an answer to his question. Garak sighed. 

“I never thought that I would find the dishonesty of politics so wearying,” he grumbled, then claimed his kiss.

“I have questions of my own,” Bashir said, after a moment spent batting Garak’s hands off. Another martyred sigh.

“Yes, I rather thought you might.” Julian pulled back to hold Garak at arm’s length and look searchingly in his eyes (as if that would help). 

“I’ll make it simple, that is, if you’ll play ball,” he suggested. “Were you a dissident sympathiser?”

“Oh _really_ doctor!” Garak sounded annoyed, breaking the embrace and walking off. He absently picked up the tunic, cast around for somewhere to put it, then apparently gave up and dropped it again on the back of a chair, whilst Julian was thinking: _I'm 'doctor' again?_

“Secretly, I mean,” Julian pressed, aware, as he said it, that it did sound ridiculous, “At the end, at least. Were you a double agent? Did you pass on information to dissidents, for example. Is that why Tain _really_ had you exiled?”

“No, no and no!” irritated. “Really, Julian, what has put this preposterous notion in your head? Surely not something Professor Lang told you.”

“You let her go,” Julian stated simply. “And her students. Quark confirmed it for me. And I’ve been racking my brains trying to explain it, and I can’t. I simply can’t. So you explain it.” The expression on Garak’s face was one of barely restrained impatience.

“As I’m sure Quark would have also _confirmed_ for you, I _would_ have happily shot them if that stupid gul hadn’t clearly planned to kill the lot of us and take credit for it himself.” Julian folded his arms and said nothing, unconvinced. “Oh, I would have done it – while I thought the risks worth the reward, namely returning to Cardassia. Once it was certain that was out of the question what was the point? They were hardly that great a threat whilst they had to stay away from Cardassia itself, and that incompetent gul had been an irritation for more years than I could count. It was hardly a difficult choice. Besides, I don’t think Constable Odo would have been either fooled or impressed.”

“Very plausible,” Julian said, but it didn’t come out quite as insincerely as he had intended. Somehow the underlying tone of the conversation had become far more antagonistic than he’d intended, and not in an erotic way. Garak’s face was absolutely cold, such as he hadn’t seen it in a long time. He advanced back towards Julian in measured steps.

“I _suggest_ , doctor,” he said icily, each word imbued with a dripping sarcasm, “That you stop ascribing such noble and selfless motivations to a man who _never had any_.” Then, abruptly, his face lightened and he smiled. Julian released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He wasn’t afraid of Garak, but he hadn’t expected that. That had been the _old_ Garak talking. As if aware of this, Garak leaned back a little to regard him with mock appraisal, then ran his forefinger diffidently down Julian’s side. “I certainly don’t have any now,” he added, now playful and sultry, and Julian discovered both hands were now making light work of his shirt. _Never date a tailor; they’d always undress you faster than you could undress them_ , he thought whimsically, not for the first time.

“Lechery!” he protested, amused, in spite of himself, willing to let it go for now.

“Nonsense,” Garak murmured, punctuating his words with little nips to the side of Julian’s neck and shoulders. “Call it…enthusiasm.”


	5. An intelligence agent has no ego

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, edited this slightly, but it's only very minor.

‘ _Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale’ –_ Strange Days.

 

It had been some time since I had last been in Tain’s private office; most of our meetings lately had been at the Order headquarters, or in more informal settings, just to talk. To socialise, if you will believe it. He hadn’t changed a single thing, I noted, noticing for the first time how everything in it managed to convey an intimidating impression of Tain, Head of the Order, and yet bore no imprint of his personality at all. 

“Ah, Garak, good. I’m glad you’ve come.”

“Mila said you were pulling me off interrogations. If I’ve exceeded myself again I – “

“No, no, nothing of the sort. You’ve done very well, Garak. You should be proud of the work you’ve done for Cardassia. But it occurs to me lately that I’ve been neglecting your education. You might be able to excel yourself further if we broadened your horizons.” 

“What did you have in mind?” I asked, curious.

“I have an assignment for you,” he said simply, “Not your usual field of work, and nothing too…delicate. But it will require a great degree of skill, and discretion. Here is a chance for you to demonstrate that flair I know you have.”

“I fully intend to do so,” I answered, aware that he had as yet given me no indication of what the assignment involved, yet trying to inject some of the resolve I felt into my voice.

“Good,” he replied, in a calm tone that I had learned never to hear without hearing the clear warning behind it, “Because I would hate to be disappointed. A man in my position has no time to spare for disappointment.” I waited. Tain paced slowly back to the other side of his desk, and sat down, steepling his hands before him, unhurried. “Do you remember that doctor you interrogated some time ago, the member of that irritating little dissident group?”

“Dr Parmak,” I supplied instantly. “What of him?”

“He was trained at Kirsk University,” Tain informed me, “One of our foremost intellectual establishments, as I’m sure you are well aware. We have also suspected for some time that it is a breeding ground for a certain flavour of radicalism. That’s the trouble with these students; they’ve spent too much time in books and too little in the real world. They get foolish ideas in their heads and dangerous ideals in their hearts. In itself, it’s usually nothing to get upset about, and we ignore it as the harmless pastime it is; a passing immaturity that most grow out of. But it begins to appear that something more organised and serious is establishing itself.”

“I thought the group at Kirsk was eliminated?” I asked. Tain frowned briefly.

“For the time being,” he replied, somewhat cryptically, “But what we found there has led us to another group at Kirsk’s rival institution, Tanrith. I want you to investigate. You’re to go undercover as a student and find out just what’s going on there.”

“You want me to _spy_ – on _students?”_ Aghast – and reckless. That came out without censoring. I should have been accepting if Tain had told me clean the Order’s toilets. It wasn’t my place to question my superiors – no matter my confidence in my own ability. Tain himself merely looked amused, clearly expecting such a response. 

“Yes. We have more than one tutor there who works for us, albeit it in an informal and insignificant fashion, picking out potential recruits.” I nodded; it was well-known that Tanrith and Kirsk, the two premier universities on Cardassia Prime, were where most of the Empire’s elite were educated and in turn sent their scions; it was also a favoured recruiting ground for the Order, who needed spies in all high places. Specialists such as myself, trained from the start at the academy, were a different breed altogether.

“One or two have raised concerns with me about certain activities amongst the youth there. I've been keeping an eye on it, but there's been no real cause for concern until recently. The tutors mean well but they don’t have _your_ level of training and I suspect that they cannot distinguish between the airy theory-spinning the fanciful sorts like to discuss after a few too many drinks, and real radicalism.”

“So what's changed, recently?” I asked.

“A degree of organisation has become apparent which did not exist before. One of their fellow tutors has been, implicated, shall we say, in radicalising and recruiting students for a dissident group, and it looks serious enough to warrant a closer look. I want you to investigate yourself – independently. Mila has the details for you. You’ll be perfect for it. Besides, you always did have an intellectual bent. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your course on political ethics.”

“I would have preferred literature,” I remarked drily. Tain chuckled.

“Well never mind. Just remember that the distinction between keeping an open mind and allowing others to fill it with all sorts of rubbish is finer than you may think. Keep your wits about you, Elim.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” 

 


	6. The boy with the thorn in his side

_Why an ear, a whirlpool fierce, to draw creations in?_ William Blake, the book of Thel.

 

Julian was aware that Garak knew him well enough to know that he hadn’t finished, not for a long shot, so, when next the opportunity arose, after dinner the following evening, he simply stated,

“Rugal.” Elim frowned for a moment, before:

“Oh, the orphan boy. What about him?”

“Why did you get involved? Why did you help?” 

“Well, anything to annoy Dukat,” Garak replied easily, “Besides, I like solving a mystery as much as you do, and it was a slow week in the skirt department.”

“Nothing to do with helping Kotan Pa’Dar then?”

“No, and before you question that, even if it were, Pa’Dar was hardly a dissident, not even by the stretch of an imagination as fanciful as yours.”

“Fair enough,” Bashir conceded, “but then there’s Tekeny Ghemor.”

“Now you’re really clutching at straws.”

“Am I?”

“As I recall, rescuing him was incidental to rescuing Major Kira, and as she no doubt took great delight in telling everyone, _he_ told _her_ not to trust me.”

“Yes, it really was touching the way you came to her rescue, you two being so close and all.” Garak gave Bashir a flat stare, but it was relieved by the mirth in a quirked smile.

“Well, Captain Sisko _blackmailing_ me aside, I confess that I was in love with her for years, but I learnt to put it behind me when she got together with Odo. Still, now that he’s gone back to the Great Link, who knows? Perhaps I’ll get another chance. I’m sure that, secretly, she always had a soft spot for me.” Julian couldn’t resist a grin.

“Sarcasm does become you, my dear, but don’t think you’re going to divert me that way.” 

“Oh? How about this way?” And Garak leapt and grabbed him, pressed an almost bruising kiss on him.

“Hey! Stop that!” Julian protested, half-smothered.

“I know,” Garak declared airily, “I’m a lecher. I _am_ going to be a politician, what do you expect? Now come here and admit you love it really.” Julian laughed, then danced just out of reach.

“Catch me if you can,” he dared. Garak’s eyes lit up.


	7. A skill like any other

_The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise. The second is, to reserve a man’s self a fair retreat. For if a man engage himself by a manifest declaration, he must go through or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself men will hardly show themselves adverse, but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought. And therefore it is a good shrewd proverb of the Spaniard, Tell a lie and find a troth; as if there were no way of discovery but by simulation’. (Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Francis Bacon, Essays)._

 

Ah, Tanrith! Whenever I picture the airy spires and window-shadowed courts, the sprawling, comfortable antiquity of that most celebrated cradle of invention and nursery of intellect, it is always with a strange, sketched clarity reminiscent of the drawings they sell to the tourists in the market square. The university sits, in her haughty splendour, dominating for centuries what had always been, and still otherwise was, an insignificant and quaintly charming country town, a grand old matriarch got up in layers of skirts and lace, who would not move from her position of prominence no matter what anybody else did. She was concerned with loftier pursuits, and had no fear for her position.

When first I saw her, on a dull autumnal evening, all those grandiose buildings were brooding and dark in the gloom, with only a myriad of yellow lights glinting through the fog to reveal their presence. They seemed exactly as I had always thought they would be: forbidding in their presence, and smug, in those glinting lights; bespeaking chanderliered halls in which the sons and daughters of the privileged learnt the secrets of the universe and the business of Empire.

Tain, for all his cleverness (or, perhaps, because of it) never made things more complicated than they needed to be. He had a talent for elegant simplicity in his schemes. Enrolling me as a student and having the agents we already had emplaced contact me would immediately compromise the integrity of the cell. He planned for me to be recruited into whatever dissident movement did exist at the university; gather names, faces, determine whether it really _was_ a dissident movement, and if so take appropriate action and report the matter to him. I was a little irked, I must admit. Amongst the lower classes, merely voicing such sentiments as I occasionally heard – seriously intentioned or not – was enough of a reason to arrest them, but here even the Order had to tread carefully. The students here were the offspring of some of the most respected and powerful families in the Empire, and, as such, they were cushioned from the repercussions of their indiscretions – up to a point. If arrests were to be made, it would have to be on solid grounds. I wasn’t used to acting with such restrictions, but I could appreciate that doing so would be, as Tain would say, an education.

I played my part dutifully. I attended lectures, I engaged in fractious disputes and the usual hedonistic exploration of new-found freedom that young people first away from home revel in. I indulged myself just a little and took advantage of the bountiful libraries, justifying it as keeping up the act. 

In the meantime, I spied on my fellow students, which was, for the most part, every bit as dull as I had feared. I also joined the promisingly-named “Society for Free Political Discourse,” which proved to be a great disappointment. The supposed hotbed of radicalism I was to uncover proved elusive. All I could detect were a lot of over-educated and under-experienced young people occasionally waxing lyrical about the merits of the Vulcan republic (good _grief!_ ) or, slightly more interestingly, our Hebitian forebears, and, by the bye, studying to become doctors, or lawyers, or scientists, or just get a degree from a university of such good repute that it would guarantee them either a well-paid job in the many avenues of city finance, or that position on the Detapa Council they’d assumed was theirs from birth, as far as I could see. Still more were sponsored by the military, and would go into Central Command via the fast-track officer training corps. Narry a thought of rebellion against the State that had nurtured them and would enable them to fulfill their every ambition once entered their heads. Why should it? The State gave them everything they wanted.

After a frustrating hiatus as a spy-on-students, albeit an enjoyable one as a student, I graduated with a passable mark and far more knowledge about the structures of government and how the State was the embodiment of the people, etc. etc., and went back to real work. There was nothing there. No truth to uncover. No story to tell. No dissidents. No real ones, anyway. Well, apart from those particular four.


	8. Private Investigations

_You cannot find your starting hypothesis in your final results, unless you are a time lord (Ben Goldacre)._

 

When Julian called Deep Space 9 Colonel Kira, inevitably, was busy, so he had left a brief message explaining the situation and asking her to call him back. Somewhat to his surprise, she got back to him the following morning.

“Julian,” she smiled warmly, and he was instantly glad to see her. “It’s good to speak to you. You look well.”

“So do you.” She did. Always hand it to Nerys; she hadn’t let Odo’s and the Captain’s departure get her down. She came up fighting.

“So what’s this about Garak?” she asked him directly, a little wariness in her tone. He knew she’d never be fond of Garak, but she had, oddly enough, accepted him in the end. Briefly, he outlined their current situation and his own investigations.

“So I’m just trying to gather whatever I can,” he concluded, realising as he said it how vague it all was, “In the hopes of….something, I suppose.”

“And what if you can’t find it?” Direct as her gaze.

“Then I need to know that too,” he said simply. She smiled a little.

“I suppose asking _him_ is out of the question,” she commented drily.

“Well I’m trying,” he joked, “Very trying, according to him.”

“Oh we all knew that Julian,” a flash of white teeth, then, more seriously, “Look, after you called yesterday I did a little digging. I thought back to everything Tekeny told me; but apart from warning me not to trust Garak that first time we met, he never mentioned him again. The person you really need to talk to is Odo, of course, but since he isn’t here….” she hesitated, seeming to weigh something in her mind, “Odo…left all his personal logs as well as his security ones, for me. He said some of them may come in useful; most of his speculations are off-record, only pure fact went into the security logs, but he seemed to think the speculations were potentially the most interesting.”

“I’ll bet they are.”

“You should see what he said about Quark! Anyway, I did a search for any mention of Garak…I haven’t sorted them for actual relevance yet but I did notice one striking thing: there’s a discrepancy – well, possibly, anyway. Garak was stationed at Terok Nor a year before the Occupation ended, although he wasn’t on the station much and appeared to have worked mostly on Bajor itself. Yet he wasn’t exiled here until the end of the Occupation, and the records show he arrived on a shuttle from Cardassia Prime.” Julian frowned.

“But if he were in trouble with Tain, would he risk going back and potentially facing execution?”

“Exactly. There’s a gap of about two months between the last known record of his whereabouts on Bajor, and his arrival from Cardassia Prime. He wasn’t on the station at that time.”

“That’s not that long though,” Julian remarked doubtfully.

“I know, but it’s all I could come up with, and something tells me he wasn’t taking a long vacation on Risa.” He quirked an eyebrow.

“I would guess not.”

“I’ll send you the log files the search pulled up,” Kira told him, “I think Odo wouldn’t mind.”

“Thank you Nerys,” Julian replied, genuinely grateful.

 

He spent the afternoon before Elim came home wading through the log entries. It was strange to be reading Odo’s personal log entries; he could just hear the Constable’s dry, terse tones in his head, and couldn’t shake off the feeling of being a naughty schoolboy peeking at someone’s diary and about to be caught at any minute.

Most of it was banal; brief mentions of stations-goings-on, quite a bit after Garak started working against the Dominion. Some mention of their shared breakfasts. Stop. Go back. That was after their ill-fated trip to the Gamma Quadrant, when Garak had interrogated – no, let’s not mince words – tortured Odo. For Tain. The first time he had seen Tain since his exile – and Odo had witnessed it; moreover, witnessed Garak as close to the way he used to be as any of them had. He suppressed a shiver.

He scrolled back hastily through the dates. Typically, Odo glossed over his own torture and focussed on the details of the plot playing out around him. Yes. There it was.

‘ _I had the impression that I was observing some critical aspect of Garak’s character and past as he and Tain saw each other for the first time. I was right that Garak’s relationship with Tain goes far beyond the professional – that of mentor and protégé, certainly, but there’s more to it than that. Whatever it was, however, I did not discover it. I only know that Tain’s hold over Garak was extreme – and still present. I commented to them at the time that they both took such pains to conceal the true meaning of their words that they ended up saying nothing at all – which was true – but there was that one point when Garak’s control slipped. “I never betrayed you!” he cried out, and the anguish in his voice, at that moment, was, I believe, completely sincere. But then he added, “At least, not in my heart,” and it was the same, lying Garak again.’_

The entry meandered after that, and Julian put the PADD down, mind racing. Odo had seen something then, a glimpse of some important truth, he was sure of it. But like Odo, he wasn’t sure what it was; even knowing Tain was Garak’s father didn’t help much. And it wasn’t facts. What he needed were facts. But where could he get them?


	9. Let the right one in

_‘Life is the art of being well-deceived: and in order that the deception may succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted’. (From William Hazlitt, “On Pedantry”, The Round Table)._

It often surprises us, when things stay the same that we always thought were going to change. How much more often are we surprised when things change that we always expected to stay the same, and when it’s ourselves – well, what then? Usually, I suspect, we simply fail to cope, but then, maybe I am as weak as Tain always said I was.

The glorious Conquest of Bajor became the Occupation, which became the debacle known as the Withdrawal. Terok Nor became Deep Space Nine. An empty area of space became the Wormhole, Prophets became aliens and aliens became Prophets once again. The Cardassian Empire became something else, but she was still called the Cardassian Empire, and something else again, and still she was the Cardassian Empire. Even sold to the Dominion, she still called herself the Cardassian Empire. Cardassian minds do not cope well with that sort of large-scale change. We’re not adapted to it. A Starfleet Captain became the Emissary. And no, he didn’t cope very well with it either. One can hardly blame him. More insignificantly, the son of a gardener became a Bamarren military student, then Obsidian Order agent, then an interrogator, then a torturer….and an agent once more, an interrogator once more, and finally a tailor. But there’s no finally until the very end, for what I am now? It is almost as if I have gone entirely backwards, back to my childhood, and become a gardener again, but now forces drag me into something else entirely. A government minister. I am not certain it is a coat that will ever fit.

The tailor didn’t think he’d fit either, though, and, for the most part, he never did. But yet – but yet. I remember when Terok Nor became Deep Space Nine. It seemed as though the Cardassians trashed the station and left in the middle of the night, and then, in the morning, the Bajorans and Starfleet moved in. It was surreal, to this piece of Cardassian garbage that had been left behind and was still reeling with the hurt of betrayal and abandonment, of the stretched terror of my exile pulling my life out in front of me. For a while, I kept myself very much to myself, hidden and kept away from these new, unpredictable creatures. But a social animal can’t live like that, and I’ve never been the hermit type.

I remember very clearly walking the Promenade that day. I was looking for a way in. I was looking for the right one. Empathy was gone, all gone; but imagination served me well, and I watched the patterns of my prey as they moved. The Bajorans were no good, of course; they were distrustful at best and hate-filled at worst, and would never give me a chance. The Humans and other Starfleeters though, they were different; wary, but, except for the occasional veteran, I was as unfamiliar a species to them as they were to me. I hadn’t had much experience with Humans before, but I knew their open friendliness could occasionally cover a deeper cunning, so I was cautious.

I had seen him before. I had noted him sitting at that table, alone; always hurried in the way he ate. Today he looked pensive. I’d seen him about the station; we’d passed briefly in the corridor once and, catching my eye, he’d given me a bright, friendly smile that I suspected was as guileless and unthought as it appeared. Perhaps it was that lack of pre-judgement that drew me in. Perhaps it was simply that he was good-looking; I will not pretend I am not shallow, at times. Perhaps it was his youth and obvious inexperience. Or perhaps it was the reason I told myself: because he was the only one who regularly sat by himself. The older officers, whilst well-meaning, had little time for him; his obvious enthusiasm grated and they were busy people. He’d fit in, in time, but he’d have to change himself a little to do it, and this place…it wasn’t quite what he’d expected. Maybe, maybe, it was even a little ghost of empathy that made me go over to him. Maybe I just wanted him to smile at me again. And he did, even though my presence totally unseated him. What I hadn’t expected was to get any sympathy back.

The implant took everything from me, except him. I had never saw that one day _I_ would be the one lying on the floor, crying _Make it stop, make it stop!_ One can appreciate the irony, from a distance. And he was there; he made it stop. It would never have occurred to him to do otherwise. And he risked _Tain_ to restore me to myself.

I changed again. Tain had accused me of becoming attached to the people I lived with. I was hardly attached to Odo; I barely knew him, although, certainly, I respected him. No, no…the feeling had come back, and not just the feeling, but the _questioning,_ the doubt, the nagging tug of alien morality that I had been steeped so thoroughly in. Different perspectives; views Tain never saw.

Now our winding paths have taken us here; a reluctant government official clinging rather desperately on another sleepless night to someone who has always, at heart, been a doctor. Like the anthropomorphic personification of all that empathy I threw away myself. Or is it sympathy again? And I keep pushing him away, because I don’t want it back. I don’t want the pain it will bring, the colossal debt that it will inevitably drag back with it. He doesn’t even know how close he has come to the truth, or what he has always called the truth, but which I still cannot name.

Briefly, a tailor became a revolutionary, but it wasn’t so hard to do as all that, because once, after he had been a torturer and before he became an interrogator again, he had already been a revolutionary.


	10. Attention to Detail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still reading, then my compliments on, and thanks for, your patience. I promise the threads will start to come together, slowly. And if you don't believe for a minute that Garak could be a dissident, well, we'll see who's the better liar ;)   
> By the way, I am taking Andrew Robinson's book "A stitch in time" as more or less as canon, though you don't need to have read it first.

** Part II: The Player of Games **

****

**Attention to Detail**

 

_He who simplifies simply lies - GK Chesterton_

 

One of my tutors at college was a fellow by the name of Nantek Untar, quite a famed political theorist in his day. He was the one who had been pointed out as ‘suspicious’ by one of our informants. Nevertheless, I had initially ruled him out as a potential candidate of interest, for various reasons, and, indeed, I had tutorial after tutorial with Untar with no hint of anything more nefarious than that he was keen on seducing me, which I evaded but did not discourage. I was, at this point, utterly bewildered. The most likely candidates for dissidents that I could identify were harmless hotheads, and I could well see why the rest of our agents (whom I had long since picked out, despite still having no connection to them) were not wasting the Order’s time with them.

It was only after the first term that I began to appreciate just how truly clever Tain was, and what a test of both my skill and loyalty he was _really_ posing. I immediately adjusted my tactics, hinting at certain…sympathies in my tutorials with Untar, leading him to believe he had won over my confidence at last. He was cautious, I’ll grant him that, but he was not trained by _my_ school, and, soon enough, he bit, and recruited me into his own private society, a secluded inner sanctum within the ‘Society for Free Political Discourse’, where, sure enough, I found just four others; others Tain had clearly suspected all along. Untar also, by the bye, seduced me, but lost interest after the initial conquest (a pattern he repeated with many an unsuspecting youth). I can’t say I was heartbroken.

Four names I had now: Nantek Untar, Filarek Rikesh, Felkan Durennt and Alor Pruss. Four that were to go down in history as the most notorious dissidents ever captured and brought to justice. Traitors to their families, their government, their people; traitors to the very system that had nurtured them and given them everything they had ever had. Names that were to become synonymous with treachery itself, but nobody knew that then. I gathered what evidence was required, reported to Tain, and two of the three, plus Untar, were quietly taken into custody by the Order, found guilty and send to trial, and that was all there was to it. Unfortunately the third, Rikesh, was the son of a prominent military official, who succeeded in bailing him out of trouble then bayed for my blood when the cosseted idiot blabbed who was responsible for his friend’s disappearance. Tain had no choice but to exile me or expose me and leave me open to the wrath of the military. That was it. That was all there was to it. _Now_ do you understand my seething resentment? I never betrayed you, Tain, but you betrayed me.


	11. They suffocate at night

**Ch.11. They suffocate at night**

_Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds: they ever fly by twilight. (Francis Bacon, Essays)._

Elim had looked so worn and tired when he returned from that afternoon’s debate in chambers, which had run late, that Julian took one look at him and immediately shelved all the questions he had as being of secondary importance, and not likely get any response except extreme irritation anyway. Garak was uncharacteristically subdued until dinner, when he managed to brighten up at the prospect of a home-cooked meal that Julian had rather haphazardly thrown together at the last minute, in the hopes of lifting his mood.

Julian deliberately kept the conversation light, chattering away about his latest research on a new vaccine for amoebic dysentery that could be administered orally and didn’t need to be stored chilled, thus enabling a more effective distribution to those areas where the ruined infrastructure hampered their efforts. Garak listened and commented politely throughout, not losing interest as he usually did after a time of Julian’s excited technobabble, but the doctor couldn’t help but notice he spoke very little himself. It was only when the conversation lulled over dessert that Garak dropped his bombshell.

“There may be an official inquiry,” he stated simply. Julian froze, fork halfway to his mouth, then set it down, trying to quell the sudden frightened beating of his heart.

“An inquiry?” he repeated.

“Into me. Into my _suitability_ for the candidacy.”

“Raking over the past you mean,” Julian remarked angrily, utterly forgetting for the moment that this was exactly what he, himself, was doing. “What’s the point of that? And do they really have the resources to waste on such nonsense?” Elim smiled fondly at him.

“It’s a democratically elected government. I’m given to understand that such wastes of resources are more or less standard practice. Be that as it may, I imagine they’ll give up rather quickly when they discover just how much of the State Records Archive has been lost, and there’s no other way to find out the truth.”

“Let’s hope so.” Julian allowed the doubt to sound in his voice, but internally, his mind was racing again. Hadn’t Elim himself once commented on the Cardassian attention to detail, their meticulous record-keeping? No doubt he’d find it even more impossible to find records than the government, but then, maybe he wouldn’t have to. If there was a single characteristic one could ascribe to Elim Garak, after all, it would be his attention to detail. Would he really have got his dates mixed up, let alone his locations, in the memoir he wrote to Julian not so long ago? Misplaced two months? Hardly. If the government was going to launch an inquiry, he was going to beat them to it. And he had more of an idea where to look – in the notes of a far more dogged investigator than himself.

He was so buoyed up by his idea for a new approach that he was wide awake, long after Elim, exhausted both from his day and from another empassioned round of lovemaking, had fallen deeply asleep – and really, what had got into him lately? Perhaps Julian should check the water supply hadn’t become contaminated with synthetic hormones or something. Eventually, knowing he’d pay for it the next day, he crept downstairs and turned on the computer, and set about compiling as many dates and locations he could for Garak’s whereabouts, based on all the sources he could, but focussing on one: Odo’s log. After all, the Constable had been both suspicious of Garak for longer than Julian had known him, and he’d kept notes of his own investigations with a meticulousness that the Cardassians themselves would have appreciated.

Over an hour spent cross-referencing Odo’s ‘confirmed sightings’ with Garak’s own memoirs, failed to throw up any more a discrepancy than the two months immediately before his exile that Kira had noted. There were gaps, obviously; indeed, for most of Garak’s life he had no idea where the man was based or what he was doing, but the key could only be in the time leading up to his exile, and there was nothing concrete that he had to go on.

In the letter that he had sent to Julian, Garak had hinted that it might have been linked to his role in trial of Procal Dukat, but he’d checked, and that had occurred over a year before the withdrawal from Bajor. It may have been the beginning of Garak’s disgrace, but it certainly wasn’t its culmination. So what then?

Elim had once told him no less than three different reasons for his exile, when he was undergoing the withdrawal from his cranial implant; reasons that Julian understood now to be more akin to metaphors, or at least stories that served another purpose. They had, however, all taken place immediately prior to the Cardassian withdrawal of Bajor, itself more or less concurrent with the beginning of Garak’s exile. He knew that, and he also knew that he didn’t know which, if any, were the truth, or what happened in those two months and where.

He shut down the computer with an exasperated sigh. So many interesting nuggets of information seemed to promise enlightenment but deliver only further confusion. He felt more stuck than ever. He pressed his fingers against his eyes, thinking some more, trying to come at it from a different direction. All right then: if his hypothesis was that Garak had, at minimum, dissident sympathies, then he needed some proof of that. Something that had left a trace. Something, or, perhaps, someone. He’d gone as far as the available facts would take him. If he wanted to prove – or disprove – that Garak was a dissident, maybe the best approach would be to ask the dissidents themselves, and he could think of two that he knew himself. He’d begin again there.

Resolved to a course of action now, the fatigue that had been kept at bay by the relentless drive of his intellect suddenly made itself felt again, and his legs were heavy as he made his way quietly up the darkened staircase, the floorboards pleasantly cool under his bare feet. He could smell, faintly, fresh paint in the attic room on the second floor that Elim had been converting into an office, supplanted by lilac blossom on a breath of the mercifully cool night air from the garden, coming through his hard-won open window, as he stepped into their bedroom, and underlain by the earthier, heated odour, still, of sex. The dark form beneath the covers didn’t stir as he came in, which was unusual; the demands and training of Garak’s former life had left deeper imprints on his nocturnal moments than his waking ones, and he ordinarily he would wake at the sound of anyone approaching.

Julian slipped softly under the light covers. They always argued about the temperature, he thought, muzzily. Perhaps it was a fundamental incompatability between lovers of different species, or perhaps it was just one of those stupid things couples argued about. He slid a cool hand over a warm shoulder, pressed up against that solid form. Scent drifted in from the window like an unseen ghost; whispered promise from an unfaithful lover. The flowers bloomed last year as well, but no fruit had followed.


	12. Rainbow Allegiance

_The will never aims at anything which the intellect has not first perceived (Descartes, Meditations)._

I attended disagreeable meeting after disagreeable meeting with the Society for Free Political Discourse, and, by night, in secret places and irregular times, I dined and drank and discussed with those particular four men in their decadent society.

Those particular four men. For them, the S.F.P.D had been just the taste of a far darker and deeper, a far more subtle and more wary rebellion. Indeed, Untar, not being a student, never attended, and the other three soon dropped out, attending only occasionally when the fancy took them or to keep an eye open for other potential recruits. Four: Nantek Untar, Filarik Rikesh, Felkan Durennt, and Alor Pruss. Sons of wealth and privilege all, apart from Pruss. Nantek Untar came from a long and distinguished line of civil servants and judges. His family all held high positions in government; his brother was officer of the treasury; his mother had worked in trade and industry, there was an uncle in the foreign office. The cabinet had virtually been his cradle. Untar himself had enjoyed a lucrative if often colourful career in the foreign office, but had semi-retired early from that and now tutored part-time and was occasional guest lecturer at the university that had been his alma mater and had made him an honorary fellow. Charming, smooth, cunning, and amoral, Untar was absolutely driven by his ambition. That, and some dark undercurrent that I could never quite fathom, but was always cautious of. It might even have been patriotism.

Durennt’s family were all in business; his mother owned the wealthiest export company this side of Kelvis Prime, and he had numerous business connections all over Cardassia and in the finance ministry. He was studying economics, predictably, and was a quiet, self-contained, driven young man. I wondered how he’d got involved in all of this. Rikesh joked that Durennt wasn’t interested in a free Cardassia, just a free market, and he was probably at least half-right.

Yes, then there was Rikesh. His family seemed to have a finger in every pie. His father had risen from a modest beginning as a gul in the mechanised infantry, to one of the most powerful legates in the Empire. Some of it may even have been down to ability. _Everybody_ had heard of Legate Rikesh, who had spectacularly crushed a full-scale uprising on Bajor not five years ago, propelling him to military stardom. His mother’s side of the family appeared to be exceptional largely through simply being staggeringly wealthy, maybe not, in material terms, more than Durennt’s, but _visibly_ so, yes. And none more flamboyantly than their playboy younger son, Filarek. His father had intended him for the military, like his brother before him, but clearly that was the last thing the young man had had in mind (or would be suited to), and he had been pushed off to university in the hopes that he would mature into some sort of civil position by the time he graduated. He ostensibly studied politics, but as far as I could tell he never actually did anything more than the bare minimum of work, coasting through on brilliance and brashness alone. He was an intense and extravagant socialite, utterly frivolous and completely sincere in his infatuations and affectations. His father detested him, and he his father, as we got to hear at loud and sarcastic length, regrettably.

Then there was Pruss, the only one of them from a working class background; his mother was a servant, his father a farmer; a local boy who won one of the rare scholarships and sponsorship from a doctor aunt. His soft country accent was always in stark contrast to the cultured upper class tones of the others. I was always vaguely surprised that they had admitted him to their little inner sanctum, though certainly the boy was talented, and beautiful – which may have had more to do with it. He was quiet and dreamy – just as I had imagined most of these starry-eyed student revolutionaries were. He was studying literature, and was forever reading some unusual tome or other, or writing poetry. The bright hope of his family, was Pruss, a loved and loving child given a rare chance to shine.

-         _Oh yes, there was a fifth man, wasn’t there? Did I forget to mention him? How silly of me, doctor, I -_

Shall I pretend I was swayed by their not particularly eloquent words? Shall I confess that their unswerving, radical patriotism, their visions of a new Cardassia, stirred the unrecognised and smouldering embers of rebellion in my heart, fanned the flames of incipient revolution? No, it was not them, those spoilt progeny of the cream of Cardassian society, who prattled on about the liberation of the sturdy Cardassian farmer, the loyal soldier, the tyranny of the autocracy, the military…whilst they themselves sipped the finest kanaar in their wood-panelled rooms of hand-loomed carpets and gold plate, stained-glass windows? These idle rich, excused by virtue of their birth from the rigours of a service life, and enrolled by application of their parents’ wallets at this seat of learning, when they thought they knew everything already? Hardly.

This was the impression I had, and the one that I wore, outwardly, to Tain, in my reports. But she won me over, in the end. I was seduced by a far more powerful tool – that of knowledge itself. I fell in love with Tanrith. Was it hearing those learned professors speak and realising that they were, indeed, learned, and so far removed from the rest of the world that considerations of political allegiance never intruded upon the pure pursuit of knowledge? Perhaps that disposed me a little more kindly towards her. Was it seeing that those sons and daughters of privilege were afforded no privilege in the exacting tutorials, seeing that the rarer scholars of merit were noticed and rewarded no matter their background? Perhaps that appeased the sense of wronged pride this illegitimate son did not wish to acknowledge he had. Was it being surrounded by such a wealth of knowledge and culture, from the denizens themselves, those learned professors and, indeed, the prime of youth, from the supremacy in every achievement in sport, music, drama, from the splendid architecture to the most comprehensive collections of works on science, literature, philosophy and every other conceivable study known, present in such abundance it was almost gluttony? Yes, perhaps it was that. These hallowed halls of learning were endless enticement to me; these brilliant minds who could, with one question, destroy every certainty you ever had, and render your argument to ashes; who could, with one statement, make you question everything you ever thought you knew until you were uncertain even of your name. Ah, there it was that I truly learnt to appreciate the thrust and parry of true intellectual discourse!

I played my part dutifully. By the end of the first year I had gone from sitting in lectures for the sake of appearances to so avidly studying my subject – that I had not even chosen! – that I was in real danger of neglecting my true purpose of being there. I had walked with an air of disdain around the society stalls in fresher’s week, but by the second year I was a member of three debating societies, an amateur dramatics society, and of course (at least partially mindful of my instructions) endured the tedium of that amateur melodramatic society known more commonly as the SFPD, of such notorious and unlamented memory. I had regarded my fellow students with a disparaging cynicism and aloof suspicion for the first term; by the third I had made a large circle of friends and dined at formal college dinners at least three nights a week; carrying on the discussions (often drunkenly) there late into the night in the bars and each other’s rooms.

Oh yes, I revelled in it, and I was terrified by it. Nobody wants to change, not if there’s a chance they can stay the same. The future is unknown enough, without adding yourself to its uncertainty. In reaction, I buried myself in the classical works of literature that our State so applauds – yet in the ideal of service to the State so exquisitely articulated by Prelok, the echoes of history whispered to me that such a golden time no longer existed, that our empire was but a shadow of its former glory, grown beyond its capacity to regulate itself without corruption; its leaders far removed from its people and the suffering of its conquered victims, blind to its own weaknesses. The State served only those who served themselves, whilst those who would offer it their every devotion and talent were excluded by accident of birth and circumstance. There was no _justice._ It was irritating enough to have to write the occasional essay to keep up my cover. It was galling to have to write essays on topics I found I no longer believed in.

But there was my duty to Tain. I saw clearly how cleverly he tested me now; one can admire Tain’s artistry, but it’s no comfortable thing to be the subject of it. You would think that it would be an easy thing to turn in my fellow dissidents, and that would be the end of it. The Order hardly needed justification for disappearing people (and, for the first time in my life, the potential for the most appalling abuse of this unregulated power was a thought I could not stand, and could not stand that I could not stand). If evidence was necessary I had only to record some of their more inflammatory conversations. But no, it wasn’t that easy. They were all from powerful, dignified families, prominent in the State and military, and not even the Order could have them arrested without solid evidence – and oh, the _scandal_ , that such as these could even _exist!_ In the perfect CardassianState, that was not supposed to be possible.

There was the desire, too, to prove myself to Tain. It wasn’t enough to have evidence. These four, I wished to deliver myself. These four, I wished to bring to the slaughter with every ounce of vicious cruelty I possessed. These four, I wished to tear down and tear to pieces, repayment for the way my every point of self-identity had been torn down and torn to pieces, no matter that it was not by them. And betrayal is still betrayal. They disgusted me. This desire was to prove a critical mistake; I was trying to be too clever.


	13. False Flag

**Ch.13: False Flag**

_Great cultural revolutions begin in affectation and end in routine (Jacques Barzan, The House of Intellect)_

Natima Lang was sitting at the same table in the café that they had gone to for a drink after Julian had first met her, sipping delicately at – of all things – a raktajino. She greeted him warmly enough, rising and beckoning him to a seat. He got a raktajino as well; alas Cardassia’s new-found cosmopolitanism did not extend to Tarkalean tea.

“I must admit,” Lang said directly, in that smooth contralto, “I was a little puzzled by your request. Something about Mr Garak?”

“Yes,” Julian confirmed, then paused on his next breath, unsure of where to begin or how to explain it.

“Is this something to do with that inquiry?” she asked shrewdly, seeing his conflicted expression.

“Yes,” he confessed, heavily, “Well, in a way. It’s complicated.” A quirk of an eyeridge.

“I would imagine, with Mr Garak, that things are usually complicated.” He gave a wry smile.

“You could say that.”

“Look, if you want me to speak up on his behalf, about what he did for myself and my students, I’m prepared to do that, but no more. I have no illusions as to what he used to be.”

“And you think I do?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking. Everybody thought he deluded himself; that he was the naïve man-child still, and it rankled. She considered that.

“No,” at last, “Not now, I don’t, but I do think you’re trying to find things that will…tip the scales in his favour, let’s say, and you don’t want to find anything that might have the opposite effect.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted cautiously, “And I do appreciate your offer, but what I need your help with is some information concerning his past.”

“I know nothing about that,” she was quick to point out, convincing him that she at least knew something _of_ it.

“You know that he worked for the Obsidian Order and that Tain exiled him, apparently in response to some…indiscretion, or even an outright betrayal.” A loaded word, in Kardasi, with so many different potential meanings. Lang was listening patiently, but her expression was guarded.

“I was investigating the reasons behind this – “ he saw the faint amusement in her expression – “because I had the feeling that it was something to do with the dissident movement, when I discovered, quite by accident, that the records don’t match up. Elim was on Bajor immediately before his exile to Deep Space Nine, or, rather, Terok Nor, but there’s a gap of about two months between when he was _actually_ known to be there, towards the end of 2368, and when he arrived on the station in 2369 at the end of the Occupation – from Cardassia. I’m trying to find out what he was doing during that time, because I believe it’s important and may account for his exile, but I doubt he’ll tell me the real reason.” She had frowned briefly at his mention of the dates, but in the next moment it was gone.

“And you think this has something to do with the dissident movement.”

“Garak said he was investigating a dissident group, but didn’t specify, and I don’t even know if that’s true or not…I have other reasons for thinking so though.”

“But no evidence.” He sighed. It always sounded stupid when he tried to explain it.

“No.”

“And he won’t tell you? Don’t you think you may simply be wrong?”

“Garak has always been evasive about his past, if not untruthful. It’s hard to know how much of that is his natural secrecy and how much of it was engrained into him during his training and earlier career, but at the moment I think it’s more a sense of shame over whatever happened that’s keeping him silent.”

“I still fail to see why you think I can help. What do you expect me to do, go around asking the few survivors of the movement if they happened to recognise a new recruit who looked like Garak?” Her voice was gentle, the fire he remembered from years ago tempered, but there was no mincing her words. “With all due respect, doctor, aren’t you trying to change his past to your own perception of it?”

“That’s just it,” Julian said, exasperation coming to the fore, “I don’t pretend to know the man as well as I would like, or have the understanding of him that another Cardassian might. But I do know him better than anyone left alive, and the more I speak to him, confront him, the more I am convinced that it is _him_ that is recreating a false impression of his past, one that is to his serious detriment now.” Her expression clouded.

“It’s a dangerous thing to force a Cardassian to face his past, doctor. For us, it is always too close to the present.”

“Maybe, but this inquiry is going to do that anyway. I would like to get there first. That way I can at least be prepared to deal with the fallout, help him through it. And don’t think I don’t understand Cardassians well enough to know that those dates didn’t mean something to you.” She smiled faintly, stirred the dregs of her drink.

“And you seemed such an innocent young man when I first met you. I’m sure Garak thought so too.”

“He did, and I was. Not anymore.”

“I’m not sure it’s not a shame.” She looked up from her drink, fixed him with a direct look. “You’re right, of course, those dates do mean something to me, they would do any dissident, and when you added that he was investigating a dissident group – I was certain. It could be just a coincidence of course but…”

“…But you don’t trust coincidences?” he supplied, dryly.

“No, I don’t. The year the Cardassians withdrew from Bajor was also a disastrous year for the movement. Things had, until that time, been progressing well for us. Both the Central Command and the Obsidian Order were pre-occupied with the terrorism on Bajor, which was spiralling out of control. Their resources were stretched thin and focussed off-world, which meant that we gained strength here. Not only that, but the Obsidian Order’s ruthless attempts to root us out were thwarted by the fact that we achieved an unprecedented advantage: one of their agents defected and became a double agent, working for us. He had been for years in fact, but it was now that it was really bearing fruit, because he had risen high in their echelons, from what I could gather.”

“A double agent? Working high up in the Obsidian Order?” He was astonished.

“Exactly so. Probably it could never have happened in the earlier days. They were too cautious, too suspicious, too good at what they did. But not only were they over-stretched, Tain had retired earlier that year; his successor was not so talented. I don’t know the identity of the double agent – I’m not sure anybody does, it was the most closely-guarded secret we had – but I do know that, at very least, they had contacts at TanrithUniversity, because they initially made contact with the dissident group through some students based there. This agent – whoever they were – was instrumental in the success of the movement. We used their information, what they dared provide, anyway, to stay one step ahead of the Order, and finally we were beginning to establish ourselves as a serious force.”

“So what happened?” A sad smile.

“The Order caught them in the end. Nobody knows how, but however cautious they were, it wasn’t enough, and in truth they were probably becoming a little too emboldened by their successes and weren’t careful enough. We believe that the double agent was found out, for we never heard from them again, and through them the students. The information they got enabled them to locate and destroy several key cells. They rooted us out and hunted us down like voles, doctor. It was the worst defeat we’d ever suffered; it effectively removed us as a power until the Obsidian Order was itself destroyed. And then the Dominion came.”

“I take it the dissidents the agent was in contact with were executed.”

“Oh yes. There was a huge scandal – most of them came from powerful families, the sort of people Cardassians thought were immune to such influences, incapable of such betrayal.” She paused. “Do you really think this is something to do with Garak? Do you really want it to be?” Julian smiled tiredly.

“He was good enough for that. He was Tain’s right hand man, his most trusted operative.” Her eyes widened at that.

“Doctor,” she cautioned him, “The case of the Tanrith Four was one of the most infamous treason trials in recent history. If Garak was somehow involved in that business, I’m afraid that no amount of good deeds will redeem him in the eyes of our people.”

“I know,” Julian said sadly, “But it doesn’t quite make sense. If Garak really pulled off such a coup for the Order, then why did Tain have him exiled?” A frown from across the table.

“I have another question: if Tain had retired the year before, why would he have had anything to do with it?” There was silence for a moment, then a look came into her eyes.

“What?” he asked, “What have you thought of?”

“It is just – I don’t want to imbue you with false hope but…there were always rumours, even at the time, that there was another agent, also a student at the university. A fifth man in the circle. But none was ever found, not publicly, anyway. I always discounted it but…”

“It would fit,” Julian said, leaning forward in excitement, “If it was Elim, then Tain would never have let it come out because it would have reflected too badly on him, and it may even have revealed their true relationship. He would have got rid of him quietly.”

“Why not just have him killed?”

“Because exile was a greater punishment. He wanted him to suffer. He more or less told me so himself. The other dissidents wouldn’t have mattered, but with Garak, whatever it was, it was personal.” She shuddered. “Professor, I need to check at Tanrith…do you by any chance…?”

“I was at Kirsk, not Tanrith, Doctor.” A sore point – Kirsk, university and city, had fallen under the last Jem’Hadar assault and there was little left of those ancient walls but rubble. Tanrith, somewhat further away, had survived. “Dr Parmak was as well. I think he had a cousin at Tanrith. Have you asked him?” Julian squirmed a little, awkward.

“To be honest, he and Garak have a bit of a, well, a bit of a history. They are fine with each other now, of course, but I’d rather not drag him into it. And anyway, he’s not an academic. You are.” She frowned, staring off to the side and biting her lip, clearly torn, but in the next moment, she looked directly back at him, decided.

“All right doctor, I’ll do it. I know some people at Tanrith now, I’ll get you access to those records, but I’m not going with you or having anything further to do with it. _I_ don’t want to get involved in this business with Garak.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do, but clearly, no one’s going to stop you now. Not even _him._ ”


	14. The hand that rocks the cradle

_It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing (Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez)._

If any of the turmoil that the new horizons Tanrith had opened up to me remained in my mind by the end of the second year, I had buried it so deeply that not a ripple made itself known upon the sea of my consciousness. In fact, I convinced myself that I had all but outgrown that childish nonsense. So I wanted the Empire to change, to improve: but that was only natural. I wanted her to become better, as I wanted to serve her better. I certainly didn’t want to tear down the fabric of society to do it. After all, the Empire had worked, for the most part magnificently, for millennia, whilst other regimes and empires had crumbled into dust. Her institutions were as close to the ideal institutions as yet existed in the Alpha Quadrant, if not the galaxy. The fanciful ideals and frankly dangerous radicalism that the SFPD liked to discuss when its members had had too much to drink was no way to go about pushing the machinery of Empire to a better efficiency, a smoother motion. I was a servant of the State, and I had a duty to do. As for my own private misgivings, when I left I would pack them away with my study notes and leave them behind; a symbol of my youthful immaturity.

Currently, that duty was presenting my latest report to Tain. I had come to the belated conclusion that this must be an extended part of my training: learning how to go undercover, and maintain that cover, for long periods of time, in a situation that, whilst it offered ample complexity, was of no particular importance or danger. It rankled a little that Tain apparently thought me so deficient in this area of expertise, but, in truth, most of my training and experience so far had been in the role of interrogator. I can’t say that I was one of those sorts who thought it would be unbearably exciting to play the embedded spy, but then maybe that was why Tain considered it might be worth exploring my talents in such a direction, and it did offer the promise of a more interesting position once this interminable assignment was finally completed. I was further encouraged when, upon reporting to the Order headquarters, I bumped into a fellow named Entek, one of my contemporaries at Bamarren. We had lunch together and he complained bitterly about his ‘trivial’ and ‘unpleasant’ assignment on Bajor, interrogating suspected terrorists. _He_ was not originally an interrogator, and it seemed that this rotation to different fields of expertise was perhaps just an aspect of our education that Tain reserved for his most promising Order trainees; his protégés, even.

With that in mind, I found that I was slightly anxious when I presented my latest report to Tain. For what could it tell him? His potential dissidents were just that – potential. As far as I had been able to discern, they didn’t even have any actual contacts with real, known dissidents, but then, maybe that was because known dissidents tended not to last very long. What else? That I was still playing the role of starry-eyed revolutionary for the SFPD, and that they still seemed like a bunch of amateur dreamers who were, as the charming human expression goes, all talk and no trousers? That was about the sum of it. I was not proud of it, and growing increasingly frustrated.

So I ascended the stairs, knocked upon the door and received permission to enter. Tain was seated at his desk, sipping red leaf tea, and thumbing through the padd containing my report, as though he were refreshing his memory, although he never needed to do so.

“Have a seat Elim. Have some tea.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, your report makes suitably dull reading, I must say.” I opened my mouth to defend myself, to explain, but saw no possibility of doing so.

“I would imagine so, for certainly it was dull to write.” A light chuckle at that. Clearly, he didn’t seem displeased. He put his cup down, leaned back in his chair (I was sitting straight-backed in mine, trying not to turn it to ramrod) and folded his hands in his lap.

“So, to summarise: there is no confirmed dissident activity at the University. There is a student society of dubious political morality which exists to discuss alien or otherwise fairytale politics, and some of the flights of fancy of these students would be construed as treasonous if there were any substance behind it, and that, you have found no concrete evidence for.”

“That is about the size of it, yes.”

“Well then, it seems that you have reached an impasse. So what do you do now?” I bit back the temptation to say: _Stop this colossal waste of my time and let me get back to real work._

“Let me arrest them,” I said instead, “Their talk is of a sufficiently inflammatory nature that we are fully justified in doing so. Let me interrogate them.”

“Out of the principle four that you have identified as being of most concern, whom would you interrogate?” I hesitated, only for a moment.

“Untar, if I could; if not, Pruss.”

“Why?”

“Untar is the one I consider most potentially dangerous, for he has maintained an interest in these ideas for over twenty years, which suggests he is at some level serious about it. By virtue of his seniority, he is also the most likely to have built up contacts with active dissident groups or individuals and therefore the most likely to supply names. Rikesh would be most likely to talk first, but doubtless knows little of real value, and moreover is from a powerful military family, which would cause problems. Durennt would probably prove more obstinate and almost equally ignorant. Pruss I consider the one most swayed by dissident ideology; he is a hopeless idealist. Although, again, it seems he is in a position of ignorance, he is exactly the one they would pick for dangerous jobs, for the same reason that it wouldn’t matter if we arrested him: his family is poor and of no influence, and it would upset nothing if he became a casualty.” Tain nodded.

“A cogent analysis. Very well; let us suppose you are lucky. You have both Untar and Pruss in your interrogation chamber. You make them talk. What have you learnt?”

“That they are dissidents who are traitors to the Empire. I would have a confession!”

“But you already know that. Or you think you do. And so what you would have learnt would be nothing of any use whatsoever.”

“But if they have names…”

“Then it is probable you would already know that too, or at least have more than an unfounded suspicion.” I had no real answer to that.

“They are traitors,” I repeated at last, still fervent, “In thought if not in fact. Isn’t that reason enough?” It always was for other people – lesser people, I thought, and quashed it. Tain’s eyes narrowed in a way that I had learnt never to regard without a certain trepidation, and his voice was glacial-melt mild.

“You seem very keen to interrogate some very poor-value suspects, Elim. One would almost think that they have betrayed you personally.” Unaccountably, my heart raced. He suspected something deeper, something even I couldn’t put a name to. Nothing got past Tain. Nothing. Outwardly, however, I just shook my head.

“They are traitors to Cardassia. Isn’t that personal enough?” Tain didn’t answer that and it was, indeed, lame. _Lower second class mark, Elim,_ I thought to myself, _Must try harder._ And, inevitably, it was time for full-on lecture mode.

“You are Obsidian Order. The Order is the State and the State is Cardassia. But it does _not_ go both ways. You cannot and must not take acts of betrayal against the State personally, or you lose your objectivity, as, it seems, you already have done. It seems as likely to me that these young men will grow out of these dangerous fantasies after they graduate and enter the real world, and thenceforth serve the State as dutifully as you yourself do.”

“And Untar?” I had to ask, perilously close to defying Tain, something nobody did without qualm.

“A harmless academic who spins theories in his ivory tower.”

“Yes, Tain.” My heart was a lump of lead in my chest. In the next moment though, he was all warm jovial solidarity again, which I loathed even more.

“Interrogation has always been your forte, and you wish to play to your strengths, I understand that Elim, it’s only natural that you should do so. To be fair, in most instances, it is the wisest course of action. But that’s not what this lesson is about. You must learn to play to your _weaknesses_ and win as well. Most of all, you must learn to wait until opportunity and evidence present themselves, and not risk changing the outcome by going hunting for them yourself. You must exist in a state of perfect doubt, your mind open to all possibilities and accepting of none, until the answer is made clear to you without your asking any question. It is not an easy thing to do, but I believe you can do it.”

“I will try, Enabran.”

“Yes you will, and you will succeed.” There was no arguing with that immutable tone. “Now, we are agreed you are at an impasse. You need to find a closer way in. Who do you use to do it?”

“I…don’t know.”

“Well, you have until the end of the year to find out. Elim, this assignment is for the long-term, not just until the students leave the university. Of course you will be given other work to do, but you are to remain associated with these people for as long as it is necessary to find the answer. And you will find the answer. You always do.”

“Yes, Enabran.”

 

It was some time before I found my opening, a time I spent agonising over my choices, failing to revise for my exams, and brooding over my ill-fortune. An opportunity at last presented itself on a wet, dull afternoon; unseasonably cool for the time of year. Another similarly wet, dull SFPD meeting, full of the usual empty rhetoric, had just finished, and the members were slowly departing; some filled with that slightly jittery, giggly conspiratorial air of children planning a midnight raid on the pantry; some, the more seriously fanatical ones, in earnest, dull discussion of the finer points of fantasy government.

As had become typical, we five lingered for a nightcap. Well, four of us anyway; Rikesh hadn’t shown up. He was busy with his latest young conquest. I noticed Pruss staring at the door with wounded eyes; his hurt puzzlement was almost touching. Perhaps Rikesh’s callous seduction and recent disposal of the boy would shatter some of that astonishing naivety.

A sudden thought occurred to me then, and I wondered that I hadn’t realised it before. Of course, Pruss – Pruss, the odd one out, the servant class scholar, the dreamer, the unguarded one. Not like the wary others, who always held me at arm’s length because they could not quite place me in their nuanced hierarchy of class, because their father did not know my father. He would be my way in. He would give me the answer that I sought.

Seeming to feel my gaze upon him, he glanced up at me abruptly; his jaw hardening in sudden defensiveness. I could well understand why; the others had probably been merciless in their scorn if he’d spoken to them about it, and the gossip was moreover all over the halls. Deliberately, I assumed a sympathetic gaze and mustered up my warmest smile for him, surprising him with a faint smile back before he ducked his face, flustered. Poor boy. This was going to be child’s play.


	15. Great expectations

_‘It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’ ­_ – Mark Twain.

It was a few days before Lang made the arrangements, and a couple more before Julian could manage to juggle his surgery duties and take a day off. He’d been obliged to tell Dr Parmak why he needed the time, and it was clear from the old man’s demeanour that he thought Julian’s investigations could only stir up trouble, but equally clearly he was worried about Elim too. Julian wasn’t the only one who’d noticed his odd behaviour of late.

It was a two hour train ride from the capital to Tanrith. The roads were still being repaired, and transporters and flights were on a priority basis. So he rattled along in an old-fashioned carriage, pressed back into service from previous disuse since a substantial number of the newer trains had been destroyed, and stared broodingly out the window. So much still needed to be restored. It was all the small things too, the everyday things, that really ground you down. Fifty minutes, the train used to take, but not all the track was intact, and they detoured round small market towns in the nondescript flatlands of this part of the continent; now, in respect of its possessing some of the more fertile arable land in the country, under intensive cultivation. The harvest that year, for the first time since the end of the war four years ago, was good, ironically fertilised by the dust and ash of previous years, and assisted by the expertise of Bajoran agricultural experts.

Things were slowly beginning to improve; slowly, still, but more discernable now. One noticed things that were beginning to get better. He had only been here two years, and it was still, somehow, longer than he’d expected. He was beginning to believe that this time, he had forged a relationship that might stand a chance of lasting. This time, he had thought, he had the maturity and self-knowledge to stick at something – something that wasn’t work, that is. And now it felt like it was about to all fall apart again, and he wasn’t sure that he _did,_ after all, have the will to stick at it, wasn’t sure, even, if part of this drive for the truth was fuelled in part by a subliminal urge to tear everything apart, get it over with. He had kidded himself that he and Elim had sorted things out between them, that this was a relationship that they had both gone into knowing what they wanted, planned, expected, felt. In truth, it had simply ended up happening just like all their previous one-night stands had ended up sort of happening.

He had rushed back to Cardassia in a panic when he’d learnt that Garak had been kidnapped by fanatics bent on revenge against any member of the former regime. Rushed back and rescued him, tended to him in his sickness and drug-addled confusion, and, stripped of pretence but not enigma, Elim had thrown all his inconstancy and hypocrisy back in his face, quoting all the poetry, all the literature, all the _words_ he had given in substitute for himself. And he’d faced up to it. Faced up to what he had never coped with before; not that he loved a man, no, nor even a Cardassian, but someone who would always be, at some level that wasn’t defined by him, a stranger. Someone whom he could not deflect with intellect, someone who would never consent to depending upon him, putting him on a pedestal, being put on a pedestal, or being shaped by him. Someone who was, on no level, an ideal – attainable or otherwise – the ideal he had always chased in his previous relationships and never quite wanted to catch. Someone who was darker and deeper than he could imagine, and yet whom he believed, fundamentally, was good. So he’d stayed. For once. He’d stayed, made himself useful, and somehow simply ended up staying – even got a house with the man without ever really thinking about it. And Garak either said nothing or genuinely trusted that he knew what he was doing.

He knew what he was doing now; trying to rescue him, because it was easier than trying to rescue _them._ And he couldn’t walk away this time. He couldn’t. But he knew that, once this was over, that was exactly what he would feel like doing. He had job offers from Starfleet; there was no shortage of exciting positions. There _was_ a shortage of experienced personnel. His parents had even come around enough that they actually wanted to see him (although he wasn’t sure that he wanted to see _them_ ). And he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t. Garak would never leave Cardassia again, not now he was finally home, and so Julian was stuck here too, if he wanted to have him. Why did facing Garak’s past feel so much easier than facing his own future?

He stared disconsolately out the window, melancholy and existing in an uncomfortable uncertainty that quite dampened his spirits about the forthcoming venture. The view was grey overcast and uninspiring. Presently, the spires of Tanrith began to resolve from out of the gloom; shadows themselves, then tall, proud and defiant. Eleven hundred years old, was the university, only a little younger than Kirsk; those two, from their very instigation, the foremost universities in the Cardassian Empire, home of more famous intellects than he could care to name.

He disembarked at the small station and made his way to Tirioch college with a newly renewed enthusiasm. The Dominion had executed academic and student alike who had spoken out against them, but Tanrith had stubbornly endured. The students had even taken thousands of the more precious books to their own homes as the war entered its last phases, the university was closed and the town was at real risk of being destroyed. And since the fall of Cardassia, Tanrith had reacted to the changed circumstances with no-nonsense alacrity, striking deals with as many off-world universities as it could to allow students to take classes there, and defiantly opening her own doors again last year. He couldn’t help but recall that she probably now had the largest surviving collection of historical medical treatises on the planet.

He was met at the porter’s lodge of Tirioch college by a junior fellow, a former student of Lang’s; an unexpectedly open and friendly young man, who proudly expounded on the university’s history – and future – as they walked past the grandiose hall and across the great court, where, he couldn’t help but notice, the central fountain stood dry and silent, and in again down long cloistered corridors, pannelled in dark wood, to the library.

His guide – Lomoch, the name was, a historian by training – showed him to an office on one side and pulled out a heavy tome from one of the shelves. A real paper book, goodness.

“A lot of our electronic records were destroyed, along with the computer system,” Lomoch informed him, “But we saved most of the paper records. This is the most recent matriculation record – it has photographs and signatures of all the entrants from the past forty years.”

“This is perfect,” Bashir exclaimed enthusiastically, thumbing carefully through to the year he wanted, found the photograph; a hundred-odd serious-looking young people in their new gowns, standing neatly tiered on the lawn in the quad. He located the Tanrith Four readily enough, having looked them up on the computer in advance; well, three of them anyway. Untar wasn’t present. Neither was Garak. Then again, he hadn’t really hoped it would be that easy.

“Professor Lang mentioned that you were looking for a former dissident connected to the Tanrith Four. Perhaps I could be some assistance?” Lomoch offered, diffidently.

“Well, I’m not sure. I believe my, er, friend, may have been the proposed fifth man.” Lomoch’s eye ridges climbed at this, though whether in incredulity or actual disbelief he didn’t know, “And I was trying to see if there might be some definite record that he was here at the same time as them.”

“There may be. They get very cross if you don’t turn up for the matriculation photograph,” Lomoch commented, “Although there’s often one or two who miss it for whatever reason. There should be a list – ah,” he indicated it on the page. There were three names on it, but one jumped out immediately.

“Elim Kachuk, that could be him.” In fact, he was sure of it. “Is Elim a common first name?”

“Not especially, but it’s not uncommon either. Would you recognise his handwriting? Because _everybody_ has to sign the book; they don’t let you get away with not doing that.” He found the signature. Julian discovered his heart racing. Knowing Elim though, he had used invisible ink. No, there it was, a black scrawl across the page; not the hand he was used to. Untidier, possibly disguised. But it _was_ recognisable, just barely, as Garak’s.

“That’s him,” he breathed, feeling like he was finally beginning to make some headway, “Is there any other record that might exist? His studies, whether he graduated or not?”

“I’ll check, but most of his study records will be gone.” Lomoch was clearly getting interested in this himself. Still, he was grateful. Usually Cardassians were incredibly unhelpful when it came to getting information out of them, despite their penchant for recordkeeping.    

“He was studying politics,” Lomoch read out to him, and Julian chuckled.

“Literature was really more his thing.”

“Perhaps his parents wanted him to study politics, to go into government?” Indeed, thought Julian. “He passed the first year with a high score,” Lomoch added, “But there’s no surviving record of his second year or final mark. There’s a graduation photograph, but he’s missing from that too. I’m afraid that’s all you’re likely to find.”

“Thank you, that’s extremely helpful,” Bashir assured him, “As long as I’m here, you wouldn’t mind if I took a look at your medical section, would you?” Lomoch smiled.

“Of course not. Actually, I was wondering perhaps if you might talk to a friend of mine…she’s studying medicine you see and I’m sure she’d be very interested to meet an alien – that is, to get, um, an off-world perspective, I mean.” Julian smiled in turn.

“I’d be delighted.” Lomoch’s friend turned up with six of _her_ friends; bright, curious and full of questions, and he _was_ delighted. He also rather lost track of time, and when he belatedly thought to check, he knew he would be unlikely to make it home before Elim did.

 

When at last he stumbled through the door, however, he was surprised to find that he was indeed the first back. He frowned, hoping something wasn’t wrong, but resisted the urge to try and contact his lover. Garak could take care of himself, and wouldn’t appreciate being pestered.

So instead he flipped up Constable Odo’s notes again. There was one thing that would lend support to his argument, and this time, he knew what he was looking for. The three younger members of the Tanrith Four were students there between 2352-2355. He’d initially not picked up on that time in Garak’s life, because, apart from it being some years before his exile, Odo had a clear record from one of his Cardassian informants that Garak had been working in intelligence during the Federation-Cardassian war. In retrospect it was a little odd that Garak had made no mention of it before, if nothing more than as a point of amusement that he had both spied on and for the Federation (and he just _would_ be amused by it), but perhaps it was because it simply wasn’t so.

The door opened and shut quietly. He hastily shut down his search windows and looked up to greet Elim, but the words died on his lips, and he watched silently as Garak reached to hang his coat on the stand; he fumbled it first try and missed the peg. Always fastidious, he pulled his boots off with a sigh and sat heavily at the kitchen table, hands resting flat in front of him, seemingly unwilling to take a single step further. Bashir rose from the sofa and went and sat down opposite him. Garak was staring at his hands, apparently unaware of his presence.

“Elim?” Julian ventured, and those blue eyes snapped up and suddenly sharpened into focus on his face, then gentled with a faint, tired smile.

“Oh I’m sorry,” the Cardassian murmured, voice slightly scratchy, “I was delayed. Counsellor Merok wanted to talk to me.” He reached one hand forward and laced it with one of Julian’s, gave a light squeeze. Julian waited. “He wanted to caution me. An official inquiry will be launched as of tomorrow.” Julian opened his mouth to say something, and found his words dried up again. What could he say? Damn? I’m sorry? Don’t worry, it’ll be fine? In the end he just kissed their conjoined hands, watching his lover’s face as he did so, trying to project his devotion into his eyes, but suspecting it was only his fear that showed there. For what he saw reflected back in Garak’s eyes wasn’t anger, or sadness, or fear, or even resignation. It was, inexplicably, _relief._

“Everything will be all right,” Garak said for him, but he was the better liar of the two of them, after all.


	16. Family is everything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this chapter contains some of my better writing, and am quite pleased with it, even if it's short. I freaked myself out with it though :P

_‘How in the name of Heaven can he escape_

_That defiling and disfigured shape_

_The mirror of malicious eyes_

_Casts upon his eyes until at last_

_He thinks that shape must be his shape?_

_And what’s the good of an escape_

_If honour find him in the wintry blast?’      (A dialogue of Self and Soul, Yeats)_

When I was first exiled to Terok Nor, I would wake, often, in the dead of night (is it always the dead of night in space?), in that small, sad room, that hard, unfamiliar bed, alone, my arm reaching for a shape beside me that was no longer there; only an imaginary imprint left behind, like a photographic negative of the heart. And often, I would wake, shivering from some night terror, and as I lay there, I fancied I saw the ghost of Pruss walk through the wall towards me, his beautiful face rendered ethereal in death, an artist’s sketch, wearing sometimes reproach, sometimes sadness, sometimes just that faraway gaze of the portrait that has grasped at the soul, only to feel it slip through the fingers at the last moment. But with time and the blissful haze of the implant, he faded away. Just another forgotten memory to box up and store away in the attic of my mind.

I have lived a life played out in the attics and cellars of existence; the warm, personal spaces in-between, the familial spaces, I have only ever passed through. Attics are where you put forgotten memories you cannot quite forget; cellars are where you hide secrets you cannot quite hide. And when the extremities of the house of one’s mind has been so filled up with memories and secrets, one finds the spaces in-between have no room left for life, or for love. On Cardassia, family is everything. I had no family, so I was nothing, and always had been.

That’s the trouble when you move house. All the old forgotten boxes get rediscovered and brought out into the light. I don’t even have a picture of him. He took one of me, once, in his impulsive way, and I had derided him for it. Later, I had tried to steal it from him, the usual paranoia taking over, but I never found where he hid it, which surprised me. I suppose it is just so much dust and ashes now, which is what I had intended, after all.

Sometimes, now, as I lie here, in my old-new home, my arms wrapped around a beautiful young man, as lovestruck and foolish as any youth, I fancy that it is the ghost of Tain I see staring back at me, contempt salient in his beady eyes. _I don’t care anymore_ , I think back at him. _This is one thing you can’t take away from me_. _One thing you can’t twist to your ends._ Yet the dead oft keep their clammy grip upon the living, and in my darkest of fears, I wonder what corrupt tendrils he has insinuated into my mind still.

The implant is still there. It is cold and it is dead, and Julian says it cannot be reactivated ever again. I wonder sometimes if it will corrode, leaching blood-rusted poisons into the soft pink blanket of my brain; a murderer’s stain as perduring as memory. Julian assures me it will never do that either. When I am dead and buried, and long lost to slow decay, it will still be there, rattling around my skull, one one last hard nugget of truth. It may never be reactivated, but it can never be removed either, and even the doctor does not deny that.

Beside me, Julian stirs, and I automatically pull him closer, nestle my head against his smooth warmth, bring my self back to the present. It’s getting harder every time. I still feel the implant, a closed fist grasping my mind tight behind my eyes, mocking, like a lover, _I will never let you go_ : Tain’s vampiric hand.

 

**End Part II.**


	17. Rock of Eye

** Part III: Use of Weapons **

**Ch.** **17: Rock of Eye**

_‘Like a long-legged fly_

_His mind moves upon silence’ (Yeats, Long-legged Fly)_

Summer in Tanrith. The boats glided lazily down the river in the shimmering heat, the measured rise and fall of the poles a slow procession of watery, _largo_ metronomes. The hot sun blazed down and turned all the manicured lawns to brown whilst the students sweated indoors over their exam papers, myself included. I got an upper second that year, I recall; Tain, in a rare display of humour, even sent me a facetious congratulatory note from ‘Uncle Enabran.’

I excused myself for a couple of days before term ended and made a report, in person, to him, on what I had been able to uncover of the S.F.P.D’s more illegal activities. Tain said it still wasn’t enough to bring them in. He was probably right; particularly as I still had nothing on Untar, but nevertheless I was slightly annoyed. People had been executed on far less evidence; why should these traitors require more, just because of the protection their privileged births had bestowed upon them? Really, I knew that what rankled was not that they needed more, but that, yes, others had died for less. Pruss, for example, would already have been taken for interrogation had that not have alerted the rest of the ring.

Exams over, the party season had well and truly started, and the tail end of the summer term was a few weeks of relaxation, socialising and unbridled hedonism.

Rikesh, in particular, excelled at the latter, and he and Felkan, in combination, always got a little out of hand. Pruss and I decided to make an early exit from the college garden party when, drunk on kanaar and rich food, he fell into the fountain and had to be hauled out. Not for the first time, I found it hard to envision _him_ ever remaining sober (in both senses of the word) long enough to organise his own underwear drawer, never mind a revolution.

I whispered this turn of phrase to Pruss as we wandered off into the garderns, and he grinned. There was a secluded walk near the southward side of the college, shaded by hilbor trees that in the autumn were laden with delicious fruit. Edosian orchids grew secretly in a small, half-hidden courtyard, and we lay on our backs on the grass, made lazy with sun, alcohol and contentment. Soft chamber music wafted over from the direction of the party.

“Rikesh isn’t so daft as all that,” Pruss felt compelled to say, after a few moments. The boy, bless him, always did have an endearing habit of forever trying to find the best in people. “He’s really very clever. I think he’s just been a bit warped by his upbringing.”

“Many of his sort are,” I agreed.

“He believes too, you know,” Pruss said earnestly. “I didn’t think he did at first, but he does.” I made no reply to that; personally I suspected that Rikesh developed fanatical devotions that came and went as quickly as the fashions, but I didn’t feel like souring the congenial atmosphere by forcing Pruss into defending him.

Instead I allowed my gaze to drift, following the growth of a hardy vine up the college walls. A sudden observation struck me.

“Those circular windows,” I pointed out to Pruss, one at each end of the wings, “High up there. I don’t recall seeing them from the inside.” Pruss’ face lit up in a conspiratorial smile.

“That’s because you haven’t. They’re part of a hidden attic space.”

“How do you know that?” Already knowing the answer: Pruss wasn’t above juvenile pranks, and exploring.

“Because I found the way in. Come on, I’ll show you.” He sprang to his feet, extending his hand to me. I took it, and followed.

 

We clattered up the wooden stairs right to the top of the west side of the building. Pruss led us confidently into a poky kitchen and pointed at a small door set in one wall, labelled, archaically, ‘Boiler room’. He slipped the latch and we crept inside. Unsurprisingly, there was a water heater, and not much else, to my eyes, but Pruss squeezed his lithe frame round the fat cylinder of the boiler and opened another, hidden door set behind it, stooping to step inside. I followed with a little more difficulty.

It was instantly warmer still than outside, and musty, as all attics are. The exposed rafters were low over our head, and we had to walk bent over, dusty floorboards creaking beneath our feet. An immediate sense of unease filled me, but Pruss was already pressing noisily ahead, and disappearing into the gloom, so I quickened my pace to keep up.

“This way,” Pruss said confidently, stooping almost double as he led me into a narrow passageway. The roof pressed in over my head and a grating claustrophobia began to eat at me.

“Isn’t this exciting?” Pruss said breathlessly. Grief, the man was a child.

Abruptly, the passageway ended and we came out in a small room, albeit one in which – mercifully – it was possible to stand up straight. Old, discarded furniture was stacked against the walls, and the sounds of the outside world were all but muffled to complete silence. Directly ahead was the circular window, divided into four panes of glass, and I went straight to it, looked out over the gardens, and saw where we had been sitting only a few moments before. The glass was grimy, and a collection of ancient, dead flying insects had accumulated on the sill. I wondered how they had ever got in, when the window could not be opened. I could almost imagine that they had been put there by the original designers, three hundred years ago and more, for authenticity, perhaps.

I turned from the window to catch Pruss smiling gently at me. The strong afternoon sunlight came through the dirty glass and lit his pale brown eyes with warmth. I quelled the sadness rising in me, thinking of his future, that he thought so limitless. I moved to say something, but then my attention was arrested by an intriguing object. Set upon a simple wooden table in the centre of the room was a scale model of the college, the very building we ourselves were currently in, perfect in every detail. I peered through its miniature windows and wondered if they had microscopic insects upon the windowsills.

“Isn’t it strange, just having that here?” Pruss commented, “I think it must be the original architect’s model, but if that’s the case then it must be very old, and it looks quite new.”

“A mystery indeed,” I murmured, standing straight again (almost bashing my head against the sloping roof in the process) and staring down at it, lost in thought.

A dizzying sensation stole over me, as I envisioned another attic within that scale model, behind its tiny circular window, and a small, perfectly to scale Elim crawling through it, like an unwitting fly, quite unaware of the larger world around him, and finding within the model another model, and an even tinier Elim within…I reeled backwards against the window, breathing heavily, an oppressive weight pressing in upon me from all sides, panic rising in my breast, as a deep insight formed unwelcome in my mind. Am I as an insect crawling around in some other larger Garak’s attic, some other, larger world? The architect outside, looking in, watching the flies he had trapped there blunder, haplessly unaware, to their fate, seeing only the blue sky and the garden, and not the glass and wood prison around them? That powerful dread seized me in a sudden grip and prickled out all over my skin. No, not I, not _I_ the architect – but _Tain_ – oh a larger ‘I’ indeed! And I knew, I knew somehow, that there was a far deeper purpose, a far greater subtlety to his plans and machinations that I had not seen, but still I could not fathom what it was.

“Elim!” Pruss said urgently, “Are you all right? What’s wrong?” I couldn’t reply, I was hyperventilating. The roof was shrinking in upon me. Pruss grabbed me by the arm.

“Get me out of here!” I gasped, and he pulled me firmly by the shoulders, not the way we had come, but further round the corner, then threw open another door and pulled me bodily out into the light.

We were on the roof, on a flat space inbetween the two raised gables. I gulped in fresh lungfuls of air like a drowning man.

“I’m sorry,” Pruss said quietly, his hands still a reassuring grip on my upper arms. “I had no idea you were claustrophobic. I wouldn’t have brought you here otherwise.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I assured him, my voice a bit hoarse. I looked into those concerned brown eyes. So young he was, young and alive and full of a flying idealism that had yet to hit against the hard dirty edges of the world. I pulled him firm against me, pressed my mouth to his in a wild impulse of passion, as if I might suck some of that vitality and brightness into my tired and jaded soul. He tasted faintly of kanaar and summer fruits, and strong unabashed boy.

He broke away at last, breathless and flushed.

“I’ve been wanting to do that to you for ages,” he confessed shyly, in the manner of one yielding their darkest secret, which to their interrogator is inconsequential gossip of no interest at all, “But I never quite had the nerve.” I smiled at him, pulling him into another kiss.

“Elim!” he protested, pulling away with a laugh, “We’re on the middle of the roof. Everyone can see us!” I still held him in my arms, and a foreboding voice reminded me of Tain, of the dangers of that most fatal weakness. I gazed up – but there was no architect, only the pale blue bowl of the early evening sky, stretching away forever, and the garden below, green mirror image. There was no giant, omnipotent Tain. Ridiculous – of course there wasn’t! I was getting paranoid.

“Why ever should they think to look up here?” I countered mildly, and he smiled and shook his head.

“Your eyes are the colour of the summer sky,” he told me, and I chuckled.

“You’re such a hopeless romantic,” I teased, and he smiled.

“So are you,” he replied, with his widest and most beautiful smile, but he sounded serious, “You hide it well, but I think you must have the most romantic soul that I have ever met.” It cut me to the quick, and I tried to crush the pain rising in me. My answering smile was doubtless strained and he pressed his lips to mine again, tenderly, soothing the hurt. “Someone has warped you too, Elim,” he said in a hushed, earnest tone, “Some dark monster has imprisoned your spirit so well they have taught you to do it to yourself…but I would let it out again, if you’ll trust me.” I wanted him to. How I wanted him to!

“Try,” I murmured. He gazed at me a long while, almost reverently.

“Do you think we’ll ever do it?” he asked me, “Bring the revolution? Free Cardassia. Change her.”

“Absolutely,” I lied straight-faced, and he kissed me again.

“Let’s go in the other door,” he suggested, “I’m not sure where it comes out though. I never got that far.” The east side attic proved to be considerably less interesting. I was relieved there were no more models, however. We pressed our way down another cramped passage, a reflection of its counterpart on the west side, although this one, surprisingly, had an antiquated electric light illuminating our progress through its wood-warm depths, until we reached what we assumed was the exit door.

“What’s on the other side?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Another kitchen? It’s a mirror image of the west gable, isn’t it?” We listened at the door a moment, but could hear nothing, so we pushed gingerly at it. It stuck, and we shoved together, only to fall straight through as it burst open and land heavily – in a bath. Pruss laughed uncontrollably, and I had to join in.

“Imagine if someone had been in here!” he exclaimed. He was pressed beneath me in the large tub. It was rather too good an opportunity to pass up.

“Care to cool off a little?” I suggested. His boyish smile spread.

I looked at the sign on the door as we crept out, rather wet. It said 301: LADIES BATHROOM. Pruss’ eyes widened, and he took my hand and we ran, laughing, all the way out.

 

By the time the summer was over, and we had graduated, I had made my report to Tain, which was more or less the same as last year’s, but he seemed pleased nonetheless.

“You’ve performed tolerably well Elim. Report to Mila for your next assignment.”

“That’s _it?”_

“As I said before, this assignment is for the long-term. Maintain your contact with those particular four. Maintain your cover with them. Watch, wait, and learn if there is anything to be learnt. Besides,” a sly glance, “That boy will be heartbroken if you just disappear, and it would be such a shame, wouldn’t it?” I didn’t ask how he knew. Of course he knew. At least he seemed amused by it, and not angered. “But that will take up very little of your time, and there are bigger things for you to be concerned with now. Mila has the details.” It was dismissal, and I left, telling myself I was glad to be leaving the past three years behind me. Apart from the libraries. Apart from Tanrith. Apart from Pruss.

All the way to my next assignment on Romulus, I thought of Tanrith, and Pruss. We’d had a brief and (on his part) emotional parting after graduation, exchanged contact details (mine detailing my ostensible work in the Foreign Ministry). I’d promised to meet again when we could. Yet still he preyed on my mind. Still, Tanrith remained in my mind, painfully clear, yet remote. Another world I had been allowed to step into for a short time, but was no longer a part of, and, in truth, never had been.

I thought of TiriochCollege, of warm summer sun and Pruss’ laughing eyes. I thought of the attic, and the model, and the dead flies upon the grimy sill; I thought of that long-dead, unknown architect, and I thought of Tain standing there in his office staring out over the city again, mind working, ever working. Sifting information. Seeking patterns. Moving his pieces upon the board. But my own vision was as dark as space. I existed in a state of pure uncertainty.


	18. Safe in Mind

_What we have wanted always is an unchangeable, and we have found that only a compass point, a thought, an individual ideal, does not change – Schiller’s and Goethe’s_ Ideal _to be worked out in terms of reality (Steinbeck: The log from the Sea of Cortez)._

 

Dr Parmak walked briskly into the surgery of the children’s clinic that he ran with Dr Bashir, who was just finishing off some vaccinations.

“Good afternoon Julian,” Parmak greeted him cheerfully. “Ah, I see the parvovirus vaccine finally got here. They really need to review their distribution procedures. I was getting worried it wouldn’t be here in time for winter.”

“I know,” Bashir replied, patting the last child on the arm and sending her on her way with a fruit candy. “Still, it did get here eventually, which is better than last year.”

“You shouldn’t give them sweets,” Parmak said disapprovingly, although he smiled. He hung his coat on the back of the office door.

“Ah, I see Elim fixed your sleeve.”

“Yes indeed. He seems to be doing a special offer: 25% extra free complaints with your coat.” Bashir laughed.

“I know, he’s been a bit tetchy lately. Don’t take it personally; I’m sure he’s just more anxious about this inquiry than he wants to let on.”

“Ah yes, the inquiry,” Parmak said, cryptically, taking a seat. He hesitated a moment, then: “Doctor – Julian – do you mind if I speak to you privately about that for a moment?”

“Of course not,” Bashir replied, with a slight frown. He shut the door and came round to sit on the other side of the desk. “What is it?” Parmak looked uncomfortable.

“I talked a little with Elim…I’m concerned about him, well, about the two of you, really.”

“Care to elaborate?” Julian asked, trying not to sound defensive. He’d heard enough ‘concerns’ iterated about his relationship with Elim from various people to last him a lifetime. But until now, Parmak had not been one of them. The older doctor hesitated again, then continued, in a careful version of his usual natural diffidence. “I think he is…under something of a strain with the inquiry. I appreciate you are trying to help, but I believe that these questions of your own only serve to make things harder for him.”

“I don’t see what the problem is!” Julian blurted, all the exasperation he had been feeling lately suddenly bursting out. “I know he likes to keep everything close to his chest, and I know this is far more serious than the teasing games we always used to play, but that’s the whole point. It’s _important_ – there’s something he’s not telling me, and it could be critical in his defence at this inquiry.” Parmak cocked his head to one side.

“Are you _sure_ there’s really…something?” he asked, curiously. “Some substance behind his reticence?” Julian ran his hand through his hair, calming himself a little.

“Oh, I don’t know what it is, but it’s something all right,” he said, certain, “It’s the way he’s behaving. It’s not just his usual evasiveness. He seems almost desperate to derail my questions; he avoids every mention of the inquiry and anything to do with his past now as if it’s fatally contagious. He’s frequently almost aggressive, almost malicious when I do ask him questions and is terse and irritable at all other times, yet he comes onto me almost every single evening like a bull in heat!” He broke off, flushed with abrupt embarrassment. Parmak had an expression of schooled disinterest on his face. He coughed slightly, and shifted.

“Does it occur to you,” he asked, his tone ever-so-mild, “That what you may find is that there is nothing that will aid him, even…that may tell against him?” Julian let out a slow breath.

“Yes it does, I’m not as naïve as he swears I am, but that’s not the point. Why can’t he just tell me? At least then I’d know what we’re up against.” This time, he did sound defensive, and hurt.

“Your opinion of him is very important to Elim,” Parmak said carefully, “More than perhaps he shows. And I know he fears, ultimately, losing you. That you might…outgrow him, I suppose. I suspect he simply doesn’t want you to know.” Julian groaned, exasperated.

“He’s not going to lose me. At least not because of anything in his past. He knows that I would – that I _have_ – forgiven him for anything he has done. I’ve told him so, on more than one occasion. It’s his lack of trust that I find hard to bear.” He sighed again. “I know it’s escalating out of control,” he said sadly, “But I also know I can’t simply stop here and leave it be. The only way out is through.”

“I see,” Parmak said thoughtfully. There was a few minute’s silence. Parmak looked to be mulling things over, staring abstractedly at a painting on the wall with a slight frown on his face. It was a view of 19th century London; it belonged to Julian. Parmak had found it intriguing when he’d first seen it. He faced back to Julian, as if just recollecting that there was someone else present in the room. “Humans,” he commented, “You’re curious creatures. Such an interesting view of the universe. And yourselves.”

“Thanks,” Julian said sourly. Parmak leaned forward, steepling his hands together on the desk.

“You know, I think you’re focussing on the wrong issue,” he said, surprisingly forward, for Parmak. _He must really think we’re in trouble,_ Julian couldn’t help thinking, bitterly. “It’s not the trust issue, as such, it’s Garak’s self-identity.”

“Excuse me?” Julian was mystified, thrown off track. Parmak appeared to be searching for the right words. Julian schooled himself to patience.

“Garak sees himself as a patriot,” Parmak explained, “Loyal above all to Cardassia. But, for someone of a keen intellect and an open mind, serving Cardassia loyally was – and possibly still is – a difficult thing.” A rueful smile.  “She is a demanding and contrary mistress. Garak was a part of the old regime, which eventually cast him out; now he’s part of the new one. His present self is one that is difficult to reconcile with the old one.” He paused, glancing up to see if Bashir was following any of this.

“Go on,” Julian urged, listening intently.

“You know our memory isn’t like human memory; it’s a continuum, and events of the past coexist seamlessly with the present. Or they should do. Garak claims that he doesn’t believe in the truth because the shifting perspective this generates gives you a different version of ‘truth’ each time. That itself is a matter of opinion, of course, but there is one other key psychological trait that is generated by this nature of our memory and experience, and that is that Cardassians tend to become very conservative and fixed in both their beliefs and personality at quite a young age. Few have radical shifts past young adulthood, and it is in fact extremely difficult to do so – someone with linear memory may look back at themselves at age 20 when are in their 50s and say that they don’t recognise the person they were then, that they have changed so much since then. In fact, I’ve heard that both Bajorans and Humans state as much. Consider the situation for a Cardassian; if you don’t recognise the person you were 20 years ago it can become a major problem, because you are not looking back on them, on yourself as you once were, but you are _living with that person standing beside you every day._ ”

“I never considered that before,” Julian said, fascinated, and wishing the gruelling schedule he’d had since arriving here had allowed him more time to indulge in reading up on his Cardassian pyschology. “And I suppose in extreme cases this can result in psychopathology?”

“Quite so. It’s called Odeyn Syndrome, rather fancifully after the ancient Hebitian deity that had two faces; one fixed looking at the past, one at the future, but unable to see each other. People with this condition suffer what may be akin to a multiple personality disorder in humans. They cannot reconcile the warring facets of their nature, and the personality fragments under the stress.”

“You don’t think Elim is showing signs of this?” Julian asked, in sudden alarm. Parmak raised his hands placatingly.

“No, no! I would have told you immediately I suspected it. Although I worry that it’s becoming a danger. I’ve seen several cases at my psychiatry out-clinic; it’s virtually an epidemic. The upheavals Cardassia has suffered lately have taken their toll, and the psychological aftermath, is, unfortunately, inevitable. It’s treatable, to a degree, but in the end the person has to come to terms with it themselves; find key fundamentals about their personalities that remain intact, for example.” Julian pursed his lips grimly.

“And you think this is becoming a real risk for Elim?”

“Possibly,” Parmak conceded, “It’s hard to say. I’ve known him for over three years now, but I don’t feel I know him very well. I do have a concern, however, that it’s not so much what Garak may or may not have done that is the problem; I think he does not want to face that whatever it was jarred against his core personality, and he cannot accept it. He is not, however, a typical Cardassian.” Julian gave a bark of laughter.

“I noticed.”

“Frankly, his ability to adapt to almost any set of circumstances is astonishing. He has played a multiplicity of roles, and been aligned to a number of causes and agencies, and yet I always assumed he somehow managed to interpret them through his one consistent devotion to Cardassia herself. I think the trouble is that a number of his roles are fictions; fabrications he created to suit the situation at the time. And these fabrications have slowly been breaking down over the years; more so, now that his future has regained a degree of certainty it has lacked for some time. I think his reticence and his distress now may be due to this slipping away, revealing his core identity. I wonder if some small part of him realises that he doesn’t quite know the truth of himself; or, at least, has not acknowledged it. I think he fears it may be something he cannot accept.” Julian’s eyes widened.

“Do you think he may always have been a dissident then, and what he cannot accept is that he really did betray Tain?” Parmak nodded thoughtfully.

“I certainly think it’s possible.”

“Maybe I should drop the questions then,” Julian said, a little sadly, “And maybe even persuade him to withdraw from the candidacy so they drop the inquiry. I believe he’s strong enough, but I can’t put him through this.”

“I think,” Parmak said slowly, “That, sooner or later, it is inevitable. My caution tells me to leave it be, but my foresight tells me…that this is something Elim must face. I think you are wise enough to know his limits.”

“I see.”

“Doctor, make sure you are prepared to forgive him, tell him. He regards you as his moral compass; he needs your acceptance.”

“I will,” Julian said determinedly, “For as long as it takes.” Parmak nodded and Julian got up to leave, his shift ended. Parmak watched him go. He hoped he was right. Because either Elim Garak was a dissident, or he was quite something else altogether.


	19. Harm of Will

_‘Violence is the conceptualisation of pain.’ (JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition)_

My return to Cardassia was a welcome one. It was good to be home after the uniform greyness of Romulus, and the uniform greyness of the people. It was good to be back amongst my fellow Cardassians again. I had seen some more of the Alpha Quadrant since then, however, and was perhaps a little wiser, as well as a little older. I had seen many things that I would never have imagined. It made me look at my home in a different way, that I was not altogether comfortable with, but the memory of strange aliens and strange customs – Romulan, Federation, Tzenkethi – they all faded in the faces of my own people. A tension I hadn’t even realised I felt slowly unwound in me.

So it was back to my old life, my old job, conducting interrogations for the Obsidian Order. I was good at it, but there seemed to be so many these days: the more extreme variety of Bajoran terrorist, brought back to the homeworld to show the populace the justice of the Empire; deluded Cardassian citizens who sought to help said terrorists; the simply incompetent; and a great long number of greedy guls and politicians who had let their ambitions take precedence over the good of the State. These I particularly despised. One could understand the Bajorans rebelling; after all, they weren’t _us._ One could even understand the sentimental fools who were misguided enough to try and aid them – but the corrupt Cardassians, who would betray everything they had been taught to hold dear out of pure selfishness? I despaired. Did nobody have a proper concept of the sacrifice of the individual needs to those of the State these days? Was everybody but the Order corrupt? And were we only untainted because of Tain’s ceaseless vigilance? There were dissidents too, of course, but few and far between these days. I supposed that we had weeded most of them out, and that they were losing strength, despite the fact that civilian discontent over the military’s mishandling of the Bajoran situation was growing, seemingly daily.

I, too, was discontent. I didn’t realise it for many months, but it was so. Then a whole host of other factors came into play, but two were perhaps more salient than the rest. The first, perhaps inevitably, concerned the Tanrith Four.

I had all but forgotten

 – _well, no, that is not true. Let me start again, whilst we are being honest. Are we being honest here? I’m not sure it matters anymore dear doctor I –_

I had quite put the Four to the back of my mind, unsurprisingly so. After all, I had been away from Cardassia for long periods of time in the years since Tanrith, and even when I was on the planet, I was invariably busy. Weren’t we all? We contacted each other now and then; but these were simple communiques between old college friends, inquiring after each other’s wellbeing, catching up on news, reminiscing about our student days; saying how we must meet up sometime, and never quite managing it. Nothing sinister or suspicious, and, indeed, not even the most dim-witted conspirator would hint at anything else.

It seemed clear, at any rate, that Tain had been right all along, as he invariably was. The Tanrith Four were productive members of society now, and had been for some years; Untar indeed had always been so. He had at length fully retired from his position as Foreign Minister, although he was retained by the office in an informal advisory capacity, and was semi-retired from college life, tutoring occasionally to keep himself from sloth and idleness, and quite probably to keep in with an ample supply of impressionable young students eager to please.

Durennt had largely taken over his family’s commercial interests and was now the CEO of one of the largest companies in the Empire, having early on made the shrewd decision to take over a failed shipyard and expanded it into a profitable supplier of both ships and munitions to the military, which was ever more demanding since the war with the Federation and the need to police Bajor.

Rikesh had been found several civil service positions by his parents, and managed to lose them all through his unpredictable nature, flamboyant excess and indiscretions. He was, however, still enormously talented, and enormously rich; he sensibly gave up gainful employment of his own and commenced solely to provide it for others, by adopting the life of the true socialite; forever putting on and attending lavish parties for the elite, making it his business to know everyone who was anyone, and, most recently, achieving some success in organising entertainments for the military top brass, gaining him some of the recognition he craved, albeit probably not of the type he craved.

Pruss, meanwhile, had spent a hard few years learning that the advantage of his education did not quite disguise the disadvantage of his social background. He had wanted to become a writer, but found no patronage – Rikesh had grudgingly consented to bankroll him for a modest volume of poetry, but quickly grew bored of the romantic notion of the struggling writer, as he did of most things, and Pruss found that a living writer needed readers to live, and he had none. He had become a journalist for a time, gaining a job as a reporter for the small regional news team in his hometown, but quit after only a year, I knew, because he could not abide the media restrictions, and factual stories were not what he wanted to write anyway. So now he worked as a humble clerk; a steady salary, to be sure, but hardly equal to his ability. I admit that the injustice of this lingered with me, although at least he could still write the things he wanted to write in his spare time; his unread poems and stories, his unvoiced dreams.

Ever mindful of Tain’s instructions, I nevertheless did not see why I could not choose to remain in the loop with the SFPD in the most pleasant way, namely by continuing my necessarily very intermittent relationship with Pruss, when I could see him, and when I could be bothered. He never complained. He had never married and started his own family, which he should have done, but he seemed not to want it. I read what he wrote; he sent most of it to me anyway. It made him happy and I did not mind, for he wrote exceedingly well, if fancifully. I saw in his words the frustrations of a man who lives in a society where one is not free to do as one chooses, and who has had the misfortune that the place that society has accorded him does not match to the aspirations and abilities he has. There were thousands upon millions of Cardassians who doubtless felt the same; probably, there are even thousands upon millions of other species in ostensibly free societies who feel the same, but they are not dissidents and troublemakers, no more than Pruss was, or appeared to be. He accepted his lot, as he accepted that his lover would only ever be an occasional presence in his life, and that Elim Kachuk, who had carved himself out a successful, if modest, career as a minor diplomatic functionary, could not lift him from his station in life any more than he could improve his own. He had pressed, initially, for my own advancement, starstruck as he was by what he regarded as my exceptional abilities, but after I had hinted at the illegitimacy of my birth (thus effectively ending awkward probing into my family background as well) he accepted that I was as limited as he was, and never mentioned it again.

Elim Garak, meanwhile, found himself filled with a similar sense of frustration. The interrogations started to drag it out of me. My sense of purpose never wavered, but my enthusiasm was dampened by my jaded vision. The implant never started working again as it used to. Why would it? I no longer had any vestige of sympathy for those whom I interrogated, and so it no longer activated no matter how far I was obliged to press them. I was more impatient than I used to be, but I never lost control like I used to or used more extreme measures than were necessary: Tain had finally succeeded in producing the perfect interrogator; dispassionate yet imaginative, and very, very efficient.

– _I assure you there is **no** pleasure in this for me, Constable. And there wasn’t. Isn’t. Wasn’t –_

Being based in the capital for a number of months now, I found myself more and more seeking out Pruss on my days off; going out to see him at weekends in his small country town, in his small flat above the solicitor’s offices where he worked, seeking some small measure of peace, perhaps.

There, one sultry summer night, was that where everything changed? That moment, when his eyes filled almost with a sense of wonder as he reached his peak, him inside me for the first time, as he fell from that height and collapsed, shuddering, upon my chest, hair tickling my neck pleasantly. He traced my marked and blood-streaked flesh thoughtfully.

“I never thought you’d let me do that,” he confessed, almost shyly, “Thank you.” I would have laughed except that suddenly I was filled with a desperate and inexplicable sadness.

“Why ever not?” I asked instead, and he actually flinched. I guessed why at at once.

“Rikesh didn’t let you.”

“He struck me when I asked him once,” Pruss admitted, face muffled against my body, and I pulled him into a reassuring hug, kissed his face. My fingers were busy tracing the ghosts of the marks _I_  had laid upon him, once upon a time when I took pleasure from the pain of others. My body still sang with endorphins at the pain I now demanded he give to me, reimagined into pleasure again by the implant, that twin arbiter, with Tain, of my soul.

“You give me everything I ask for, without asking why,” I said, knowing that neither sadism nor masochism were his vices, except in the form of words.

“You ask for what you need,” he said simply, reaching up to kiss me again, “And I know you don’t ask that of anyone else.” I could taste my blood upon his tongue. He knew my pain, even if he did not know from whence it came. He knew, because he felt it. He had kept that half of himself that I had destroyed.

“Alor,” I exhaled, feeling my soul struggling against its bonds once again. He had said that he would free me if he could, from the monster that had imprisoned me. Was it that moment, then, when everything changed? When I silently beseeched him: _Alor, Alor, the world cannot be changed by words alone!_ _Imagination is but the bastard child of wayward memory and capricious time, and now she finds herself forcibly wedded; hand-in-hand with empathy._

Later, much later, he spoke into the dark, fear etched in his tone.

“Untar wants to see you.” _Then,_ it changed.


	20. How soon is now?

_High tales and low tales_

_Love has no part here_

_Story upon story_

_Would you marry me?_

_23 lies you told_

_Many more lives you hold_

_Thought I could believe (Death in Vegas, 23 Lies)_

 

Julian debated with himself a long time over whether to confront Garak about his university years, and ‘Elim Kachuk’. He eventually came to the conclusion that it would be best to leave it alone – Elim was becoming increasingly stressed about the inquiry and the selection procedure, and on occasion even irrational, and he obviously didn’t need the strain of being forced to confront something potentially painful for the sake of satisfying Bashir’s curiousity. Nor did he need to find evidence that the past Garak had been more like his present self; in truth, he probably hadn’t been, and Julian hoped he had matured enough to stop trying to change the people he had relationships with, or see in them an imagined perfection.

In the end, however, external matters forced his hand. The persistent investigation into Garak’s past had come out with some damning information concerning his previous…employment. Nobody particularly cared that he had gathered intelligence; they _did_ care that he had been a torturer; they _did_ care that he had been the right-hand man of Tain. They questioned the motivation of someone who, they found, had been personally responsible for the interrogation of at least one political dissident, in now working for a government shaped by such people. Hell of a time for the Cardassian government to suddenly demand moral standards of its staff, Julian thought sourly, although in truth he knew he should be grateful that this was so.

Dr Parmak had eventually given a testimony on Garak’s behalf that had quelled that particular storm; nevertheless, the mood remained ugly. There were one or two snide comments about him too, inevitably, but one frosty look from Garak had shut _that_ troublemaker up. When he learned, however, that Garak had received death threats he had suggested that he withdraw his candidacy, which would hopefully mean the inquiry would also be dropped. Some things were more trouble than they were worth, and Elim had never really been that keen on the idea anyway.

“I’m serious,” he pressed, when Elim dismissed the notion out of hand, “It’s not worth risking your life over.”

“My dear, if these people’s assassination skills match their spelling, I hardly think it’s much of a concern.”

“You’ve already been targetted once,” Julian pointed out. Garak had in fact been abducted two years ago – which was what had finally spurred his own frantic return to Cardassia and the development of their more-off-than-on affair into something resembling a proper relationship. “You never really talked about that,” he added, realising it for the first time. Everything had happened so fast. And afterwards, there was so much else to be getting on with. Elim just shrugged.

“Nothing much to discuss. Besides, as you may recall, I was rather crudely drugged into a less than intelligent state for most of it. It’s all, if you’ll forgive the cliché, a bit of a blur.”

“Like that time you spent here before your exile you mean?” It came out without censoring, and he instantly regretted it. Garak, however, barely reacted; just a quirk of an amused eyeridge.

“No, that was just boring. I left it out of my account to you, as you have apparently noticed, because it was quite unexiting reading.” A brilliant smile; his very best. Julian didn’t believe it for a minute.

“You don’t seem surprised I asked,” he ventured.

“I’m only surprised it took you so long. However did you contain yourself? I must say, some of Constable Odo’s observations about me were most entertaining.”

“You _read_ it?” he was aghast.

“Well you shouldn’t have left it lying around on your computer for anyone as curious as yourself to find.” Julian blanched.

“Nerys is going to _kill_ me!”

“No, my dear, I imagine she’ll want to kill me – a slightly more serious prospect than those other malcontents, I’ll grant you. However, as you so correctly point out, _I_ have a queue, so she’ll have to be quick.”

“Elim,” Julian began to protest, but Garak crossed quickly over to him and pressed his hands to the side of his head.

“No,” he said firmly, “In answer to your original question. I am going to go through with this investigation.” He pressed a kiss to his forehead, still holding him. “In answer to your second, I went to a university reunion. Old time’s sake, that sort of thing.”

“Elim!” in exasperation.

“No it’s quite true my dear. I was on an assignment at my former _alma mater_ infiltrating a particularly intractable dissident circle that took some time to crack. Unfortunately, due to a rather bad oversight on my part, one of the ringleaders escaped and – well, Tain never was very tolerant of mistakes. He was furious.” Julian could only stare. Elim kissed him again, then smiled, a little sadness in his eyes. “And that,” he added, “Is what you would call the truth.” Another kiss, on the lips this time, softly. The truth? Julian thought dazedly, as, meeting no resistance, Elim’s mouth lingered, ghosting warm against his skin, then began to slowly travel in a meandering path to his ear, leaving tingles in its wake.

“You’re doing it again!” he protested suddenly, feeling warm hands insinuate themselves down the back of his trousers to press against his buttocks. “What’s got into you lately?” but he couldn’t help but laugh.

“I’m not sure,” Garak said, sounding serious, “But I’m opting for lechery.” He grinned, then pulled him close.

He might have left it alone then, figuring enough was enough, but Garak woke in the grip of some unspoken terror in the middle of the night, and had crushed Julian against him, staring with a fixed dread at some point in front of the wall, before waking properly, disoriented and paranoid, and it took a long time to soothe him back to sleep.


	21. Negative capability

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um. The whole thing is looking like it is going to clock in at a little over 60,000 words. Well, it speeds up a bit towards the end, honest!

_To betray you must first belong (Kim Philby)_

 

It was some time before Untar and I were able to arrange our schedules sufficient to allow a mutually convenient and discreet opportunity to meet. Ironically, in my supposed employment with the Foreign Office, which had until lately been Untar’s stomping ground (and still was, unofficially), I should theoretically have found it easy to arrange a meeting. Even my actual employment meant that I was in the capital most of the time. As it was, it was perhaps another three weeks or so before we managed it. Part of this was complicated by Pruss, who was being strangely obtuse about things and, moreover, had recently lapsed into one of the depressions he was occasionally afflicted with.

At length we were able to occasion a rendezvous at Untar’s private apartments, located in a well-to-do part of the city favoured by former civil servants. I called on him one mellow summer’s evening; just a former student paying his respects to an old tutor. It had actually been some years since we had met in person; he looked older, of course, but not unduly so. Time and a rich appetite had bowed down the ridges of his face and rendered him somewhat portly, but he was as lively and alert as ever.

“Kachuk, you look well. You’ve filled out a bit from your student days I see.”

“So have you,” I responded dryly.

“How’s your career in the Foreign Office going?”

“Well enough.”

“I suppose,” he remarked cryptically, “That you’ve done as well as can be expected, for a man of your, shall we say, modest background.” A sharp suspicion as to what _that_ meant stole over me. He had the barely concealed triumph of a man who knows he has something over you; I suspected it was nothing of real substance, but was wary, nonetheless.

“Come now, Untar, you didn’t invite me here to trade pleasantries. What’s this all about?”

“And you used to be so fond of conversation.” He handed me a glass of kanaar without having inquired if I wanted one. From the rich aroma rising from the glass, it was an exceedingly good vintage. I drew in a deep breath of it, then set it to one side on the table. A sly glance at me. “That charming boy of yours hasn’t told you?”

“He has not.”

“Hmph! You struck me as a more persuasive sort than that. Still, it’s nice to know he can actually obey instructions now and then.” He sat down in a richly upholstered chair; it had scratch marks upon the arm, I supposed from a pet, though none was in evidence.

“He did lead me to believe it was of some importance.” I sat cautiously in the chair’s twin, opposite to him, though it left my back to the door. There was a kotra board upon the table between us, an ornately designed set with the pieces cast as soldiers. I resisted the temptation to pick one up and toy with it; evidently he was in the middle of a game. I wondered who his opponent was.

“And so it is.” I schooled myself to patience. Untar obviously wanted to gloat over whatever victory he thought he had achieved (though certainly, if that was his habitual chair, it was not at kotra). Untar sipped thoughtfully at his glass for a moment more, whilst I studied the board.

“You’ll be hard-pressed to get out of that mess,” I observed, pleased when a brief irritation crossed his face.

“You are aware, of course, that Tanrith is a recruiting ground for more than one sort of organisation,” he said, ignoring my jibe.

“Well, obviously.” I feigned a look of scandalous shock, “Why Untar, have you been moonlighting with the historical re-enactment society behind our backs?” His mouth quirked.

“No. In fact I have for some time now been working for a more clandestine organisation than that; both in my own humble capacity as a purveyor of certain sensitive information that, in my position, I am privileged to come into possession of, but also a recruiter for others that I think are excellent candidates.”

“And now you want to recruit me into this… _clandestine…_ organisation.” Good grief, just how many ‘secret societies’ did that wretched university spawn? Didn’t people have anything better to do?

“I do. You are, in many respects, an ideal candidate, and I do hope you will forgive my not asking you before, but of course it is imperative to take very great care over whom we choose.”

“Of course.” My, but he was full of his own self-importance today.

“I have already asked the others of our little group and they have accepted. I hope you will make a very fine fifth man for us.”

“I’ll certainly do my best, if you ever tell me what it is.” I injected a suitable amount of mockery into my tone, but inwardly I was keeping my excitement in check; that he had already recruited the others and they had actually managed not to let it slip was telling indeed. This was it. This was the door to the inner sanctum. This was the real solid link with the dissident movement that I had been waiting for all these years. Then I remembered what Tain had said, and forced myself not to speculate.

“I,” Untar stated proudly, “Am an agent of the Obsidian Order.” My whole world flipped briefly, and I allowed the shock to show upon my face. I could hear Tain as clearly as if he spoke the words in my ear. _Do not speculate. Exist in a pure state of uncertainty. Wait for the answer to come._

“Excuse me?”

“We are all agents of the Obsidian Order. And now I want you to be too.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I’m perfectly serious, I assure you.” He was enjoying himself, and I knew my reaction would be critical. It had to be Elim Kachuk’s reaction. I half-rose from my chair, as if involuntarily, my hand reaching for a weapon at my side that was not there, my eyes glancing of their own accord at the door, seeking escape. Untar burst out laughing.

“Oh, relax, Kachuk,” he waved me back to my seat, “Forgive me, but I have always wanted to crack that calm of yours and it is good to see that I can surprise even you.”

“I don’t understand,” I ventured, although I did sit down, mentally repeating Tain’s words to myself like a mantra. _You must exist in a state of perfect doubt, your mind open to all possibilities and accepting of none, until the answer is made clear to you without your asking any question._

“It’s very simple, Kachuk, and I’m sure you’d see it if you weren’t so shocked. I have succeeded in getting myself and the others recruited to the Obsidian Order. With our inside information, the movement will have a massive advantage. We can finally beat them.” My mind did another about-turn even as the answer I’d been seeking all these years was handed to me on a plate.

“You’ve _infiltrated_ the Order,” I did not have to feign my shock, but I exaggerated it to a level appropriate to Kachuk, “Have you lost your mind?! They’ll find out! The Order knows everything! They’ll catch you!”

“Oh I don’t think so,” supremely confident as only one supremely wrong can be. “The Obsidian Order is the biggest threat to the dissident movement, and the one organisation that we must evade at all costs, something we have singularly failed to do. I’ll give them this, they _are_ exceedingly good, and they have thwarted us at every turn, but they are not omnipotent.

“The reputation I have built up over the years and the high standing of my family has at last paid off. They asked me to work for them on a purely informal basis many years ago when I was tutoring at the university. They wanted me to pick out candidates for recruitment, and to keep an eye open for any potentially treasonous activity amongst the students. I knew then that even the mighty Order was fallible, for even then I had began making my plans for a new society, a new order. They are very cautious though; it is only recently that I have had any access to actual information myself.”

“And now you’ve succeeded in insinuating no less than four actual dissidents into their ranks, including yourself.”

“Five, including you. They will accept you Kachuk, be assured of that.”

“Oh I am.” Wryly. “I’ll give you this, Untar, you’re certainly…ambitious. And creative.”

“The Order is over-confident. They are blind to their own weaknesses, the biggest of which is that they do not believe that families that have both suckled from and nurtured the Empire could ever betray it. We will act as informants for them; feeding them tidbits of information suitable to our modest means and ability. This will occasionally necessitate giving them something actually useful, of course, but then there are always sacrifices to be made in any revolution.”

“Of course.”

“But then _we_ will be informing the dissidents of _their_ movements. We will be one step ahead, and, when the time is right, we will strike.” I did not ask what he meant by that last statement; it was the first that interested me most.

“The only dissidents I know are us,” I remarked.

“And I’ve kept you in the dark long enough, I know Kachuk. Don’t worry. I have built up contacts with several independent dissident groups over the years; we will each be the contact for different cells.” Despite his arrogance, he _was_ good. Maybe if Tain had allowed me to do some _real_ spying I would have found those contacts myself, but that I had not done so in my initial investigation spoke highly of his skill.

“Not such a quiet retirement for you then Untar?” He laughed.

“No indeed. You’ll do it, won’t you Kachuk?” I picked up my untouched glass and made a show of draining it in one long draught. It _was_ good kanaar, but it burned on the way down like it was bad.

“Oh I’ll do it,” I agreed, “Although I still think you’re mad to try and double-cross the Order. Still, you’ve managed so far, apparently. I doubt anyone else could.” He grinned, basking in the compliment.

“Well, I won’t keep you. I’m sure you have things to do. We can arrange the…administrative details later.” I rose, and, dipping a minute bow, took my leave as graciously as I could muster. I wanted, acutely, nothing more than to leave.

Outside I drew in a deep lungful of the mild night air, my mind awhirl. I had never expected all my careful investigation to pay off so handsomely after all those long years of fruitlessness. I had never thought that Tain’s prediction would be so spectacularly proved right; that, in the end, the answer would be made apparent without my ever having asked the question.

Under other circumstances I would have been jubilant at my success, but in fact I was furious. Whilst Order agents were generally operated on a cell basis for infiltration missions, the fact was that one person had access to the name of _everybody_ on our rolls, and that one person was Tain. He had already known Untar was an ‘informant’ for the Order! Not only that – an actual paid-up agent for no little amount of time. And he had sent me chasing after him for years without a word!

I stomped ferociously across the capital, trying to walk the anger out of my system, and, after a time, I did calm a little. The fact remained that Tain had not had proof positive of Untar’s dissident connections, and, whilst slow, this was the best way of getting to _everybody_ he knew; it was certainly elegant. With the members of the SFPD all recruited into the Order, he could keep them on his strings like puppets, and pull them all in whenever he saw fit; them and all their terrorist friends, all that juicy information, all those ripe traitors, all at once. One could admire Tain’s artistry at a distance, but it was no comfortable thing to be the subject of it.

I realised then that my steps had nearly carried me all the way to Tain’s house, intent as I had been on confronting him, and that would never do. Untar was almost certainly having me trailed; I had in fact been aware of someone following me for at least the past mile. So I detoured to a nearby park and sat for a while contemplating the gardens, like a man who had a lot on his mind. It was a muggy night; oppressive and laden with the heavy, overripe scent of Bajoran lilacs.

It was not hard to guess what – or rather – whom, had finally bought me Untar’s complete confidence. Pruss had doubtless spoke on my behalf, and he had persuaded him, believing him privy to the secrets told to lovers. Indeed, I had told him many things, many tales; all truths in their way, but all lies too. I had a shrewd idea as to what Untar thought he knew about me that made him so sure he understood me, but decided to leave that lie for now. It might yet serve me further.

I got up from the park bench and wandered over to the train station, where I got on the last train out to Pruss’ provincial little town, because this is what Elim Kachuk would do, and was I not Elim Kachuk? How amusing it was, I told myself, that I was being recruited into an organisation I already worked for. As if my tax returns weren’t complicated enough! It didn’t work.

I sat in an carriage, empty except for one solitary and snoring drunk, and it was as though I was in that state of uncertainty once more. But tonight I was Elim Kachuk, the dissident, riding out to take solace in the arms of his lover, to reassure him that all was well, and that whatever it was he had said to Untar, it did not matter, it was the right thing to do…

…In the morning, Elim Garak would return to the capital, where he would go to see Enabran Tain and tell him that he knew that the four people he had been assigned to watch were dissidents and traitors of the first division, who had dared to think they could defy the Obsidian Order itself. Who dared to dream that they could bring down the Empire and everything she stood for. Except that Elim Garak himself no longer believed what the Empire stood for. He hadn’t since Tanrith, and he had ignored his heart and done his duty for all those years because he existed in a state of pure uncertainty, and whilst he was waiting for the answer he didn’t have to make the decision. And now he did.

Tain had set me a task, he had said; a technical assignment, to test the very limits of my skill. He had told me to play to my weaknesses and still win. And I had. How proud he would be of his son, I thought, when I told him.


	22. The most valuable lesson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains quotations from 'In Purgatory's Shadow'.

_The movie never changes – it can’t change – but every time you see it, it seems different because you are different. You see different things (Twelve Monkeys)._

It was a warm afternoon, and Dr Bashir was lying on their bed, drowsy but unable to rest. He should have been catching some sleep before returning for his evening surgery, but he couldn’t. Everything was turning over in his mind, and that supposedly enhanced mind was having a hard time trying to make sense of it all.

After Garak’s latest set of evasions, Julian found himself somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. For a while, he had wondered if he even _should_ proceed. It wasn’t that important to him, personally, to know, and, at a certain point, he had to respect Garak’s wish for privacy, surely? Everyone was entitled to a portion of their soul that they didn’t share with anyone. Moreover, the strain of the inquiry – or perhaps the strain of his memories – was now taking a visible toll on Garak. The only mercy was that when the inquiry was launched, he had been temporarily suspended from his duties, which at least allowed him to remain home and rest. Julian had thought this a good thing, but if the devil made work for idle hands, then an unoccupied Garak was increasingly difficult to live with, and his behaviour increasingly erratic; worryingly so, in his professional medical opinion.

His lover seemed to spend most of his days closeted in his attic office; either writing (what, Julian did not know) or continuing his radical redecoration. Every time Julian went up there the furniture seemed to have been moved about, with neither rhyme nor reason for it. Sometimes he had come home for his afternoon siesta, in the heat of the day, and found Garak sitting staring unresponsively into space, so much so that it took several calls to draw his attention back; a man who normally snapped awake at so much as the movement of a shadow. The sudden surge in Garak’s libido had abated somewhat; he suspected that had simply been a means of distracting him from his pursuit of the truth, and, now that the inquiry was doing that anyway, there didn’t seem to be a point to it. Yet he craved closeness of an evening in a way he hadn’t demonstrated before, and frequently woke in the night from, for want of a better word, nightmares, staring fixedly at a point in front of the wall as if he were seeing something, or someone, that wasn’t there. Julian was half-afraid he actually _was._ Sometimes, too, he clutched his head as if he were in pain, but insisted he was not, fingers wandering distractedly over his scalp, as if feeling for an injury, or an old scar, and his moods swung dangerously from frivolity to quiet despair, even to rage. Several times Julian had been on the receiving end of that biting sarcasm. It was too much an unpleasant reminder of an earlier time in their lives, when the implant had malfunctioned, but Julian had checked and it was still inactive, and otherwise stable. Sometimes Julian would wake in the night to find him gone altogether; out walking god only knew where and not returning til dawn.

More and more he was afraid that it was the beginnings of Odeyn Syndrome, and he didn’t know what to do. That small, private part of Garak’s soul seemed to be expanding and taking over everything else, and it was a very dark place indeed. Yet part of him felt he had to continue his own investigation, if only to get some knowledge with which to fight against this – whatever it was. To know what they were up against. He was well aware that raking over the past, digging up people’s secrets, usually only led to trouble and heartache – but he wasn’t the only one digging now. The inquiry was real, serious and ongoing – and goodness only knew what they would find. He forced himself to confront the unpleasant possibility that what they would find could be very damning indeed, and that they wouldn’t even have to fabricate the worst of it. Despite what people thought of him, Julian had no illusions as to what Garak could – and probably had – done as an agent of the Obsidian Order. If he ever had, Section 31’s manipulations of him had long since stripped him of such delusions. Nevertheless, he could not help but feel that whatever it was, _he_ wanted to know it before they did, to try and do some damage control, at least. To stand by Garak, if nothing else.

What would it come to, if the inquiry found evidence of Garak’s collusion in the exposure and arrest of those political dissidents? Would it only mean the loss of his current position, and the impossibility of his serving in any future capacity? Or would it mean worse than that? Disgrace? Trial? Imprisonment? Exile, again? Could Garak, the consummate survivor, survive even that? More, could he survive a second judgement, from his peers, that he had betrayed Cardassia? He feared not. The provisional government vacillated between the need for justice; to find those responsible for bringing Cardassia to her current state of destitution, and between the need for reconciliation; to heal the gaping wounds of the past and start anew for the future. He knew that it was largely Garak’s detractors who had pushed for this inquiry, but if they started down this line of inquiries and accusation, they could all be sucked down into a pit of recrimination and vengeance. No, perhaps it would not come to that. The need of Cardassia was too great; the voices of those who cried for revenge were drowned by those crying out for succour, and healing.

He sighed, getting up and turning on the computer with a sigh, once again running over everything. He had tried to sort out what were immutable facts from mere supposition, but even that, with Garak, was proving difficult. He re-considered everything, and tried to prioritise. The inquiry was focussing on Garak’s potential links with the Tanrith Four, something that was in itself suspicious. How had they known that was what he himself had been drawn to? Someone, somewhere, had talked; he didn’t like to speculate who, but he had a pretty shrewd idea. At any rate, it made a certain sense, given the importance of the case.

It also made a certain sense given the suspicious nature of the timing. Garak’s cover had supposedly had him working as minor functionary in the foreign office for years (the ministerial department he _actually_ wanted to work for now, Julian couldn’t help note, with grim irony). This had allowed him to travel between Cardassia Prime and a number of different offworld assignments without arousing undue suspicion; notably the Romulan Embassy, Tzenketh and, towards the end of the Occupation, Deep Space Nine (Terok Nor, rather) and Bajor. He had however, spent a number of his earlier years on Prime, largely in the capital itself. Julian had no real proof that Garak had gone to Tanrith at the same time as the dissident circle, but the circumstantial evidence was certainly suggestive. It was even more of a suspicious coincidence that he had been _back_ on Prime immediately before his exile – right at the time of the arrest and trial of the Tanrith Four, _and,_ he realised suddenly, somewhat later that the trial of Procal Dukat, which meant that that couldn’t have been the direct reason for his exile.

If Garak had been the one responsible for the capture of the dissidents, then it made no sense that Tain would have exiled him. If, on the other hand, he had somehow aided them, then it made perfect sense – the other dissidents faced trial and execution, but Tain wouldn’t have wanted Garak exposed to the public view like that, because it would have reflected badly on the Obsidian Order, and probably on him. Certainly, he wouldn’t have spared him out of sentiment. So he either decided to deal with Garak privately – and Garak had escaped what could very well have been an attempt on his life – or he had exiled him, knowing it would be a crueller punishment. This did require that Tain had outfoxed all of them, but Julian wouldn’t be surprised if he were capable of that.

So why did he find it hard to believe? Because it would have required that Garak was ‘turned’ whilst he was at university – and that he had worked for the Obsidian Order, deceiving Tain for years – before finally being forced to make his move. Garak had always been more receptive than the average Cardassian to new ideas, but he had always, when they were on Deep Space Nine, defended the existing pf the Cardassian state to Julian. It was possible that this change of heart had occurred rather late in the day, but this didn’t feel right either, and he knew why: Tain. It always came back to Tain, in the end. Hadn’t Garak said that Tain had moulded him into a mirror image of himself? Hadn’t that deep tie made him go and try to save him, twice, even after Tain had exiled him? Could Garak really have turned against his own father, as well as the ideals he’d been raised with? Of course, Garak had also called Tain a monster. And he was.

He turned the computer off, lay back down again with an arm over his eyes. He wished he could do what he had when the implant had malfunctioned.

_“Where are you going?”_

_“To find the man responsible for this.”_ But that man was dead now, and he somehow doubted he’d tell Julian what had happened even if he weren’t.

_“You’re the one who ordered him to put that implant in his head, aren’t you?”_

_“I never had to order Garak to do anything. That’s what made him special.”_ Yes, _special_ , your _son,_ you utter bastard. He remembered, unwittingly, that scene in the prison camp, as he had remembered it so many times: Garak’s face, briefly, so raw and open; confused, like a child’s, before it became shuttered again. That scene Garak had let him see. The one thing he wanted, perhaps, as much as he wanted to go home. Acknowledgement from his father. Not even pride, just simple acknowledgement. Tain had denied it; almost reflexively, he thought. A trained reflex, born of years of habit. But then – then, he had granted Garak’s request. And why? There was nothing left for him. No time, and Garak had promised him his revenge. He needed nothing more from him. Was it that Cardassian need for the family driving him to it? That need of mortals to know that some part of oneself will continue? Or was it, perhaps, a glimmer of kindness? Of sentiment?

 _I should have killed your mother before you were born. You’ve always been a weakness I couldn’t afford._ But he didn’t kill her, or Garak. He let them live. The faces of the Tanrith Four floated up before his mind again; not the stock photos on the library on the computer, but the matriculation photos. Those students; youthful boys with open faces filled with confidence and a lively intelligence, gowns flapping in a summer breeze.Instantly recognisable, standing in the middle: Filarek Rikesh; handsome, spoilt, arrogant, brilliant.

_I was a fool…_

The tutor, Nantek Untar, seated slightly left of centre; haughty and aloof.

_Let this be a lesson to you, doctor…_

Third row, second from left, Felkan Durennt; self-assured, self-contained, quietly clever.

_Perhaps the most valuable one I can teach you…_

And, almost obscured by a taller boy in front, and staring off to one side, as if dreamily into the distance: Alor Pruss; shy, starry-eyed and oh, so beautiful. The idealist. The romantic.

_Sentiment is the greatest weakness of all._

Even Tain, at the end, had shown a glimmer of sentiment. And what of Elim? Elim Kachuk, Elim Garak, they were, in the end, both the same man, standing next to each other, the past concurrent with the present.

_If that’s true, then it’s a lesson I’d rather not learn._

He sat up abruptly. He knew what to look for next. He’d always known what to look for next. He just hadn’t wanted to admit that he already knew the answer.

_If that’s true, then it’s a lesson I’d rather not learn._


	23. The greatest weakness

_When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion (CP Snow, ‘Either-Or’)._

It was in a fact over a week before I was able to see Tain; I had been obliged to drop him a coded message informing him of my success, which rather took the sweetness out of being able to tell him in person. I wanted the reward of his approval of my efforts, but when I finally got to speak to him, he had revelations of his own.

“You’re _retiring?_ ” The disbelief must have been evident in my voice. Tain was amused.           

“Elim, I’m not as young as I used to be.” In fact, at that moment, sitting relaxed in a comfortable chair, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes twinkling with merriment, he looked like nothing so much as the archetype of a benevolent grandfather.

“But – but you can’t!” It was a lame protest. That of a toddler who finds his wishes crossed by an uncaring universe and simply cannot fathom it.

“Oh I can, and I shall. A man outlives his usefulness, as much as anything. The true servant of the State knows when he has reached the apex of his achievements, and steps back to allow others to take his place.”

“But there is still so much left for you to do! Enabran – the military is not only making an utter mess of the Bajoran situation, but they are corrupt and riddled with over-ambitious legates and guls who would direct the business of the Empire according to their own ambitions, and of course the civilian ministers are completely ineffectual. You are the only one who can stand up to them!” But Tain shook his head.

“One man is not the Order, Elim. Besides, I’m old, and I’m getting tired. Don’t distress yourself. It won’t be for another few months or so.” Clearly, his mind was already made up, as it always was.

“I will miss you, Enabran.” It was as close to sentiment as I dared get with him.

“Hmm,” was his only response to that. He got up from his chair and looked out over the city, as was his habit. _His_ city, _his_ Cardassia, I couldn’t help but think. How diminished would she be without him? How much more in danger from her enemies? “I have not decided yet upon the matter of a successor,” he added, and I blinked. I hadn’t even thought about that. He turned to face me. “You are, of course, my most talented employee, but I am loathe to draw you away from useful work and into the tedium of administration. It would be a waste of resources.” I bowed, instantly mollified. Better than words of affection, from him. “Well, I will think on it some more.”

“What of those dissidents?” I ventured to ask, desperate to know what he had planned for them. Tain actually laughed out loud.

“Ah yes, our little double agents, who think themselves so clever! Well, well, we’ll have to see about them, won’t we?” I quirked an eye ridge.

“Why Elim, you’re not angry I didn’t tell you?”

“Of course not; I understand that this was the most effectual way of gaining the maximum information. I have learnt the lesson, Enabran,” I added, pointedly, then, deliberately teasing, “Although now I am working for you twice over I do hope to be on a double salary.” Tain chuckled again.

“I’m minded to give it to you. You have done very well, Elim. In answer to your question, I’m going to leave them as they are for now, and you’re to maintain your cover, and your ties with them. When the time is right, I’ll pull them in, and take all their traitorous associates too.”

“I thought that might be your plan.”

“In the meantime,” Tain continued, “I need you back on interrogations. As you so pertinently observed, there are a lot of over-ambitious legates about lately, and I want you to investigate one of them and bring him in for questioning when appropriate.”

“Who is it?”

“Procal Dukat.”

“I’ll see to it at once.” I bowed again and left swiftly. Ordinarily in such a situation my mind would be pre-occupied with my new assignment, but this time, as I clattered down the stairs and out into the streets, all I could think was that I still, after all, had time. Time to decide. Time to change my mind. Time to act. If I wanted to. If I should. Perhaps, at the least, I could dissuade Pruss. Oh, but it was foolishness!

The interrogation of Procal Dukat was not my finest hour, I will be the first to admit. I was preoccupied with my vacillations over the dissidents, and Tain’s impending retirement. Somehow, the thought of carrying on without him made it all seem even more pointless. Worse, Untar, now eager to pull me down into his nest of betrayals and intrigues since I had won his full confidence, was demanding more and more of my time. I did not see much of the others, including Pruss, which was something of a relief, for I found it hard to bear, being with him.

I acted stupidly. I got sloppy. Desperate, perhaps, to feel something real and untainted by tint of betrayal, I somehow succeeded in involving myself in an affair with an officer’s wife when I should have been concentrating on Dukat. Yet even with her there was betrayal; by her, of her husband (howsoever he deserved it), and by me, of Pruss, of my duty, which should have come first. It was perhaps inevitable that I would bungle the interrogation. The implant did nothing for me; my impatience overrode my caution and my wits were dulled by distraction. I made mistakes. And I paid for them.

 

I more or less had to go into hiding after the trial, which was vastly humiliating. Dukat’s younger son, a pompous gul who had recently become Prefect of Bajor, and thought this made him lord of heaven or something, was baying for my blood. Unfortunately he could make quite an impressively noisy baying. For one who was supposed to remain an anonymous shadow, this sudden thrust into the limelight was not at all welcome. Even less welcome was the inevitable summons from Tain, and it was with a heavy heart and deep sense of dread that I climbed the stairs to the most feared office in the Empire. He was not a man to tolerate mistakes, particularly not in me. My earlier triumph felt even more hollow than before.

“I expected better from you,” he said straight out, cold and to the point, as I stood before his desk like a child before the headteacher.

“I know. I expected better of myself.” My voice was hollow, defeated.

“Sit down, Garak. You look exhausted.” A pause, and a shrewd look from him. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “I wasn’t thinking, I suppose. Perhaps I have become over-confident lately.” Tain didn’t look like he believed that, and for the first time, a real intimation of fear stole over me.

“No,” he said, slowly, “No, I don’t think so. Under-motivated, more likely.” I opened my mouth to protest but he waved me to silence. “No, no, it is perhaps not entirely your fault. You’ve had a lot of work to do these past few months. Perhaps I asked too much of you.”

“Perhaps,” I murmured, barely audibly.

“But this leaves with me a dilemma, Elim. I can’t have you in the capital whilst this is still running. You’ve made yourself rather conspicuous, and I won’t be here for much longer. I can’t protect you.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“I should think not. And the woman, Elim, what were you thinking? Have I not told you a thousand times before, that sentiment is the greatest weakness? Did you really think you _loved_ her? And that it mattered even one iota?”

“I think – “ I struggled, “I think I felt sorry for her.” A derisive snort.

“I thought I had cured of you that.” So did I. And it wasn’t true. I hadn’t felt sorry for her. I’d only felt sorry for myself. Tain sighed. “Nevertheless, it is vexing. I’d hate to lose you, Elim, it would be a shame.” He paused, got up, and walked round the desk. He drew the heavy drapes; it was night outside, and the lights of the city twinkled below; as inviting and somehow distant as the stars themselves. I hardly dared wonder; was this forgiveness, from Tain? He sounded almost as if he was casting around for a reason to keep me.

“Well, you’re still a young man, and young men often get foolish notions in their head,” Tain commented, talking to the view, as if loathe to admit he might be turning the unfamiliar notion of leniency over in his mind. Or maybe it was an admission of his own? How old had Tain been when he met Mila, after all? And why _hadn’t_ he had us killed, as he had so often threatened? But I had no time to speculate on this now. Tain stopped his ruminating and looked back at me. “Nevertheless, I’m disappointed,” direct now we were back to the home ground of criticism. That didn’t mean it didn’t sting. “I’m in a difficult situation, Elim. I don’t think I can keep you in quite the position that you’ve become accustomed to. Still, it would be wasteful to throw away your talents altogether, and I do so hate waste. It’s inelegant.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, resisting the embarrassing urge to shout _Name it and I’m your man!_

“I think reassignment is in order,” he mused, “Rather a long way from here. I want you to take over interrogations of terrorist suspects on Bajor itself. The situation there is deteriorating rapidly and of course the military is clueless with how to deal with it. They have no idea about how to cope with internal uprising, and, indeed, it’s out of their juridiction. Our staff out there has been limited for some time, but now the military is actually requesting more help, so I think we should give them it.”

“To which province will I be assigned?” I asked, accepting already. Part of me was glad to be leaving Cardassia again. Somehow, living here was becoming unbearably claustrophobic.

“None of them. You will be based on the space station Terok Nor, although you will be travelling to the planet frequently.” I hesitated to reply and he glanced up at me. “Is there a problem with this?”

“Isn’t the Bajoran Prefect, Gul Dukat, in command of Terok Nor?”

“He is. What of it?”

“That could make things…difficult.”

“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you were so indiscreet,” Tain retorted sharply. I nodded grimly. “Besides,” Tain added, disdain clear in his voice, “He’s just a gul. I’m sure you can handle him.”

“Thank you,” I replied. What else could I say? I wanted to say something.

“I expect you to be on Terok Nor for at least a six months,” Tain added, then turned to look out of the window, “Although of course the exact duration will be up to my successor. I will have left for the Arawath colony before then.”

“Of course. Goodbye, Enabran.” He made no reply. I didn’t really expect him to. I turned to leave.

“One more thing, Elim,” he added, unexpectedly, “Those dissidents you’re watching. I’ll have someone else take of finishing that since you’ll be offworld for sometime. I’m sure you can come up with some convincing excuse for them as to why you won’t be around for a while.” I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it and just nodded acceptance, then turned to go, heart heavy.

Why did it have to end like this? Why couldn’t it have ended on the note of victory that I had achieved last time, no matter that it was tarnished? Why on a failure, and Tain’s abiding disappointment? Perhaps I, too, had passed my zenith, and was now tumbling down the slope of errors towards the pit of total incompetence. And some small, perhaps not so small, cowardly part of me was only glad that I would not have to see Pruss’ face when he realised he was betrayed, that I would not have to be the one to break him, to stand in the interrogation chamber and drag out the ideals of something I had once wanted to believe in, but had never dared enough, and never hoped enough, to quite do. There was no longer time.

In that, as with so many other things, I was wrong.


	24. Neural rust

_‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. (Francis Bacon, Essays; derived from the Bible, John 18: 37-8)._

Julian knew where to find Garak the moment he stepped through the door. Apparently his lover had left work early, complaining of a headache, and refusing to let Dr Parmak see what the matter with it was. So Julian trudged wearily up the stairs, feeling the heat rising by degrees as he did so, all the way to the attic room.

He hesitated outside the door, and knocked before going in, a formality he seldom bothered with anymore. A wall of stifling heat hit him as he opened the door.

“God, open the window for goodness’ sake!” he exclaimed, “I don’t care how hot Cardassians like it, this can’t be good for anyone.” Without waiting for permission, he crossed to the window and did it himself. The sash stuck slightly with its new coat of paint, and when he finally raised it up, the air that flowed in was no cooler, although it was, at least, a little fresher. Nevertheless, he felt the sweat startle out of his pores.

Garak was seated at a desk he hadn’t seen before, eyes languid. Julian indicated it with a brief wave of his hand.

“Finally find one you liked?”

“Actually, I ordered one made to my specifications.”

“I had no idea you were so particular. Not about _desks_ anyway.”

“Well, it’s irksome to write at a desk that isn’t quite right for one, don’t you find? Besides, it’s good to generate the employment.” Julian just raised a sceptical eyebrow. “I left work early to take delivery of it. I hope I didn’t concern you, my dear.”

“Dr Parmak said you had a headache.”

“He’s such a worrier, that man. He’s been bothering me all week.”

“You nearly bit his head off, Elim,” Julian reproached, “You might try and be a bit more civil, it’s only because he cares.”

“I suppose he has told you that he thinks I’m developing some exotic psychiatric condition.”

“Odeyn Syndrome? Yes, he has.”

“And what do you think?”

“Right now, I think you have a headache and should have a lie down. In a cool room.”

“Oh really, my dear doctor it’s hardly – “

“And,” Julian cut him off, “That I would respect his professional opinion when it comes to the Cardassian mind.”

“What do you know of my mind?” It was probably meant to come out with a cutting sarcasm, but it was muttered too low to carry any bite, “What do _either_ of you know, about _my_ mind?” Julian sighed, and sat in the spare chair. The chair was old. Elim had salvaged it from god-only-knew where, and insisted on carrying it miles through the streets home, and Bashir had just accepted it as one of Garak’s quirks at the time. Now he was wondering how long this thing had been developing. Garak was fabricating this office with the same elaborate care that he constructed some of his more convoluted lies, and for what purpose?

A heated touch on his cheek drew him out of his reverie, and he looked back to meet a focussed blue warmth.

“Where did you go?” Lightly teasing. He quirked a light smile.

“Same place as usual. Trying to follow you and getting lost.”

“Oh, I think perhaps you know me just a little better than that. You haven’t asked me a single one of those burning questions I’ve read in your eyes all this past week, after all.” Julian leaned back in his chair, hand coming up to stroke his chin. He felt, of a sudden, a telltale lump in the throat and prickle in the eyes.

“What should I ask?”

“What comes to mind? What do you want to know?” Julian glanced out the window a long while. The dirty sunset washed everything out the colour of dried blood; it felt sadly appropriate, an acknowledgement that this was what he was trying to analyse; old blood stains.

“You said those last three months you spent back on Cardassia Prime, before you were exiled, were for a university reunion.”

“You didn’t seriously believe that, did you? Why have I been putting so much effort into my lies all these years when anything will do?” Bashir refused to respond to that.

“I believe you went to university,” he said instead, and watched the guarded tension rise in the man opposite him, “I would guess, a long time before then. When, exactly?”

“2152-2155,” Garak responded promptly.

“Where?”

“Tanrith.”

“Prestigious. I’m impressed. What did you study?”

“Political ethics.”

“Really? I would have thought that literature was more your thing.” A thin, bloodless smile.

“Well, a young man is necessarily somewhat obligated to obey the wishes of his family, and I rather fear mine would have thought literature a fanciful waste of my time, and their money.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Julian pointed out.

“Of course not. Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?”

“Because I know you won’t answer the ones I _don’t_ know the answers to. Not even with a lie.” Garak cocked his head to one side.

“Well that would seem rather self-defeating of me, wouldn’t it? After all, it’s in my best interests to let you know what we’re up against before this inquiry finds out first.”

“It’s not self-defeating, it’s self-denying,” Bashir retorted, unable to get up and stop himself pacing about the modest space. The floorboards creaked. “You can’t answer the questions; you can’t even lie because you don’t know the answer anymore. And you don’t know the answer because you’ve twisted and retold it to yourself so many times it’s lost all semblance of its original shape. You’ve duplicated it so often you no longer remember what the original was. You’ve divided and compartmentalised it all so neatly and so carefully separate that you can no longer assemble the whole from the parts. And you’ve buried it so long you’ve forgotten where you’ve put it.”

“Doctor, you make my mind sound positively chaotic.”

“On the contrary, to achieve what you do takes a mental organisation not even I could lay claim to. And that’s the problem, isn’t it Garak? Because the external circumstances are no longer conducive to the maintenance of your internal ones. The coat no longer fits. It chafes and itches and pulls in all the wrong places, and, sooner or later, you’re going to have to reach into the wardrobe and pull out another to replace it, one who’s colour and style you don’t know, and fear will suit even less.”

“Is this rather stretched clothing analogy supposed to make me sympathetic to my own tormented psyche? I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific, doctor. What is it, exactly, that you are trying to ask me? Or tell me?” Bashir took a deep breath, rallying his racing thoughts and feelings for a moment.

“I’m telling you that you have to face this.”

“You’re advocating risking almost certain psychosis? I must say, your medical methods have got rather more radical in recent years.”

“This isn’t funny, Garak.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You know you have to face this, and I think you’ve already been trying. What I’m trying to tell you is that you have to find your answers before somebody finds them for you. Or finds _an_ answer, that will probably turn out to be the wrong one.”

“And what if the answer _is,_ as you put it, the wrong one? What will you do then? Will you still be here?” Julian sat down again, leaning close, and took Garak’s unresisting hands in his own.

“Of course I will.”

“You don’t know that for sure. You’ve always been assailed by doubts about me. About us. It’s been the only hope I have that you might one day achieve wisdom.” Julian just smiled.

“You’ve changed, Elim, whether you see it or not, and whenever it happened, you’ve changed. Do you think I would have stayed if I hadn’t seen that? I stayed, and, when this is all over, I will still be here.” Garak ducked his head for a moment, apparently unable to meet his eyes.

“If that’s the case then it seems you already know the answer.”

“I do,” Julian answered softly, “And it’s this.” He leaned in and kissed him, gently, tenderly.

“You are so very human at times,” Garak murmured against his lips, “No wonder you say that love is blind.” Julian drew back a little then, a light in his eyes that denied the dull sun.

“We say that justice is too.” He rose, drawing the Cardassian up with him, still clasping his hand, walking them towards the stairs.

“Come and lie down,”

“I really do have a headache, Julian.”

“I know. Come and lie down. You should relax. Everything will still be here later. And I _know_ you carried that desk all the way up here yourself didn’t you in this heat, didn’t you?”

“The housekeeper helped me.”

“Elim, we don’t have a housekeeper.” His arm jerked as Garak stopped abruptly, and he turned, but Garak was smiling at him already.

“I’ll think of a better lie next time.” Deliberately, Julian quelled the swell of alarm that roiled through his stomach.

“No, next time you’ll ask for help.” He tugged insistently, and, reluctantly, Garak followed.


	25. Unfinished sympathy

_‘Joy and woe are woven fine,_

_A clothing for the soul divine._

_Under every grief and pine_

_Runs a joy with silken twine.’ (Auguries of Innocence, William Blake)._

It’s such a small, quiet memory that I have often wondered why, lately, it surfaces so often in my mind, amidst the weight of all the dark, tainted things. Perhaps its very lightness carries it above the others. I am sitting at our regular lunch table, thinking about Delavian chocolates, which is quite shameful at lunchtime, really, and how, if I had known that the shuttle was going to be destroyed, along with the fleet, and Tain – well, I would have eaten the whole damn box before we even made it out the wormhole. For the sweet subtlety of them. For the comfort. A taste of affection.

“Garak, are you listening to me?” the doctor asks, the slightest hint of exasperation in his voice. I replay my short-term memory to retrieve his opinion of some dreadfully pompous Earth poet whose merits he is trying to convince me of: as part of our literary explorations, we have briefly diverged from theatre to poetry, for which, as with so many things, I have Shakespeare to blame. I realise I have paused too long when his eyes narrow, and he says, “That’s a no, then.”

“I’m sorry doctor, I have been a little…pre-occupied since I came back.” It’s too close to the truth, and I wonder how it managed to slip out, but it’s worth it for the instantly contrite expression that appears on his face.

“I’m sorry, Garak, I realise that…everything that happened, well, it must have been pretty awful for you.” It’s a clumsy attempt at sympathy, but it’s as sincere as all the others and he does not, at least, follow it up with that awful, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ so he has learned something. As have I, I remember.

“It’s over and done with now,” I give the expected reply, “Thanks to the gracious assistance of…my friends –“ the word still tastes alien in my mouth, but in a spicy, enticing way, “- I should be re-opening the shop in a couple of days.”

“That’s good news.” He pauses to shovel – and I’m afraid shovel really is the only word that will do it service – more pudding into his mouth. It is strange how the most irritating of habits can be endearing, when seen refracted through a different lens of emotion.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” he says, unexpectedly, and his grin is bright with mischief, “You’ve no idea how glad. I was forced to have lunch with Chief O’Brien, and it was _awful._ ” I have no need to feign my shudder at that, and he suprises me with a smile that has all the warmth of his soul in it. “I mean it,” he adds quietly, but more seriously, “I really missed you.” I smile back, and make it a sincere one, but I never say the words. It doesn’t matter though, because he understands, and he gives without ever expecting anything back.

Before, I used to label _that_ as the moment when I realised how much _I_ had changed; not that ghastly moment on the ship with Odo, not when I let Lang go, nor even when I screamed in my own pain; not a thousand other moments, but that one. That small moment. But there is no one moment when one changes; it is a gradual flow of movements like the shifting of a million sand grains, blown to the prevailing wind, moves an entire dune and bends it to a different shape. I still remember the cool touch of his hands on my face when we materialised on the platform, the more than professional concern in his eyes. I remember him staying up with me all night when I was in withdrawal from the implant, offering empathy in place of endorphins. Or was it sympathy? And yes, I kept pushing him away, because I didn’t want it back, and I didn’t think I could take – the pain it would inevitably bring with it. And one day, I will remember him sitting with me as I watch Tain die, a constant thread linking one thing to the other, and one day further still, I will let him in, and I will loop back to those other moments, and whatever pain they bring, they will bring.

The warm, familial spaces, I have never lived in, but I have supped in the warmth of a friend’s dining room, and I have seen what lies there.

 

**End part III.**


	26. Suffer Little Children

**Part IV: Inversions**

 

Rome for empire far renown’d

Tramples on a thousand states,

Soon her pride shall kiss the ground, - Hark!

The Gaul is at her gates! (Cowper, Boadicea).

I spent the best part of a year – well, perhaps it was nine months, or was it eternity? – well, anyway, I had been on Terok Nor for some time and the end still did not seem in sight. There also seemed to be some confusion over my exact status; Tain had said that I was to be overseeing interrogations on Bajor, but my contacts in the Order seemed to regard me as having little more than probe status, and virtually ignored me. Too late did I consider that my favoured status as Tain’s right hand man had made me many enemies that I had not even met. Or maybe it was part of the general shambles of the Occupation, which seemed to be falling apart at the seams every day.

For all practical considerations, I was now at the beck and call of various incompetent military officials, to whom I would be summoned when they needed someone of my expertise in their ongoing war against the civil insurgency on Bajor. Fools. Any schoolboy at Bamarren could have told them that you cannot wage war against terrorists. There should never have even _been_ a civil insurgency; a proper intelligence agency operating on Bajor in the first place would have rooted out any organised dissent before it had a chance to take hold, and kept the rest of the populace cowed into obedience far more efficiently than the military’s heavy-handed techniques. But the military had jealously tried to keep hold of as much power on Bajor to itself as possible, and the Detapa council’s interference had complicated matters for some time. The Order had never gained enough manpower and resources, or sanction from those competing interests, to manage its business as it on Bajor as it should have been allowed to, or things might have turned out very differently.

Now, the terrorist problem had grown out of all proportion, and an admittedly abused populace, forever punished for the activity of the rebels as well as for being conquered, was agitating for rebellion on a planet-wide scale. Resistance was no longer the work of just the resistance, it was the norm.

I hated it. I hated every minute of it. It was hard to decide which I hated the most; being stuck on that wretched space station, constantly having to avoid Gul Dukat’s irritating (if hopelessly clumsy) assassination attempts and swaggering, gloating contempt, or my various assignments on Bajor; stuck in one filthy barracks or prison after another (nothing so luxurious as an interrogation chamber!) with yet another terrorist. I even admitted to myself that I missed Pruss; he at least would have taken my mind off things. I hadn’t realised what a comfort he had been to me, until he was out of reach. His letters produced a great homesickness in me, but I read them nonetheless, and replied when I could, still maintaining my cover, of course. Besides, old clothes are oft the most comfortable. I savoured them, knowing that one day, they would simply stop, and that sometime later I would hear news from Cardassia Prime, of a great triumph against those who would tear down our beloved State, an infamous trial. It burned me to know that I was the one who would have paid with his soul for such victory, but, at the end, none of the glory would be mine. From the youngest age, I had aspired to live my life as one of Preloc’s heroes. Now it seemed that I was; I had sacrificed everything to the State, and was being left with nothing. It didn’t feel nearly so good to live it as it did to read it. Just another fiction. Just another lie.

Never before nor since that first time I undertook coercive interrogation as a newly-fledged Level One interrogator have such activities given me so much misery; and never had they seemed so pointless. The Bajoran resistance fighters were fuelled with a fire born of desperation and patriotism, something that I could even respect, and never cracked easily. They had also spent many years learning the hard way the importance of never letting any one person know too much. I usually got _some_ useful information out of them, but never enough to compromise more than one cell. The hardened fighters weren’t so bad, but some were little more than ignorant peasant youths – barely more than children, most of them brutalised without purpose by the troops, who were themselves inured to horror and violence by long exposure and copious amounts of alcohol. Had I not made that mistake once before, I would have joined them, but I knew that my only way out of this nightmare was to do my job properly.

And so I did, for as long as I could, but it was beginning to seem as if there were no end in sight. Tain had retired to the Arawath Colony, and, so far as I knew, I was not exactly in his favour anyway. Who knew how long I would be stuck here, doing this job that I had no appetite for? Then I remembered that the way I used to be able to do my job properly was when the implant still worked for me. After a while, I devised a remote triggering device that allowed me to activate it upon demand. I will confess, the first time I tried it, a test in the privacy of my quarters, at the lowest level, produced such a heady rush of endorphins, remembered bliss and, with it, present loss, that it sent me to orgasm, after which I cried for a long, long time, the first time, I could recall, since I was a very small child. But I felt better for it.

I triggered the implant, at first, before interrogations. It gave me something to get through them with. Then afterwards, as a reward. Then, late at night, in my quarters, when I couldn’t sleep, and I told myself that it was not getting out of hand. I always was such a good liar. Everything in my life was beginning to take on something of a blurred aspect, a deliberately scuffed line between fact and fiction that sometimes seemed in danger of disappearing altogether.

People in the best of circumstances seem to suffer a failure of imagination; they cannot conceive that all their fortune could be snatched away from them in an instant. Similarly those in the worst of circumstances often see no way out of their misery. Fate, as always, can surprise them both and utterly turn things around.

It had now been some time since I last heard from Pruss, and I was beginning to wonder if that particular problem had finally been tidied up by whomever Tain had assigned it to, but then, one day, unexpectedly, another letter appeared. I was on Bajor at the time, on interrogation duty once more, and the letter finally got forwarded to my current base of operations, a miserable barracks in a burned-out part of the city of Dakorian. I came out of the rather basic bathroom suite, having cleaned up as best as I could after being in that filthy cell, and found it waiting on the desk. So I shut myself in the office and indulged myself a few moments to read it before I had to go back on duty.

It was, on the surface, an innocuous communication; irrelevant chit-chat and a suggestion for an old university reunion, just like the good old days. He used however, a number of pre-arranged phrases that meant that it was far more than that: this was an urgent meeting of our society, nothing less than a call to arms. They were finally making a move; the big putsch. I couldn’t believe it. More than that, I couldn’t believe that they were still at large. I knew that things at the Order had already started sliding since Tain had retired, but someone had messed up badly to let this one slip through the net. I had to go, no matter the danger to myself. I had to go. All my hard work, all my sacrifice, was _not_ going to be in vain. I refused to allow that. Not after everything I’d worked for, everything I’d suffered.

There was an abrupt knocking at the door, and Glinn Thondt, who was the military officer in charge of this particular corner of dirt, stuck his scowling face around the door without waiting for my permission. None of them had any respect for me, or even basic manners.

“You’re needed in cell three. Twelth patrol just brought in another group of captured terrorists. They’ve undergone intial processing and are awaiting your attention. He tossed a padd at me.

“Get Karos to do it. I’m busy.”

“Karos is…incapacitated.” Blind drunk, that meant.

“ _Again?_ Well, Salis then!” I almost shouted, feeling a sudden surge of temper.

“She’s home sick.”

“Really?” If sarcasm were a poison, Thondt would have wilted away. Being a rather unimaginative, stoic military type, he merely stood there. “The Gul wants everyone processed by tomorrow.” I snatched the padd from him, and gave its contents a cursory glance without even reading it. Did I have to do everything myself? I pocketed the letter and shoved past Thondt, who wisely made no comment on my rudeness, and stormed off to interrogation chamber three.

I soon regretted leaving my coat behind in the office. The centre had lost its heating last week, ironically due to a terrorist attack on the nearby military base destroying some of the fuel pipelines, and it was the middle of winter. The room was bitterly cold, and it stank, because it hadn’t been properly cleaned in days, and its inhabitants apparently not for weeks. I was dismayed when I entered, and glanced at the padd again. Yes, it was there, the ages the ‘terrorists’ had given – 18, 17, 19 and 16. I don’t know why I didn’t see it the first time. I must be tired, I thought. I would have estimated 14, 12, 15 and 11, at most. I had seen them or their like a thousand times upon the streets, begging for scraps of food and clothing to supplement the rags upon their bony backs, and they had been picked up because they’d been seen hanging around the site of the latest act of sabotage. The military was clearly populated by fools. Was this what I was reduced to? Interrogating street children who probably didn’t even know their own names? Oh well, hopefully it wouldn’t take long, and, with any luck, I wouldn’t have to press them too hard.

After half an hour of unproductive questioning, I was convinced that they knew nothing of any use whatsoever and was ready to sign them over to the troops for execution. I wasn’t sure that Glinn Thondt would be entirely happy with such a brief session however; probably he would imagine that I had not done my job properly if I didn’t take a few more hours and take a few more extreme measures with them. I considered such an act a pointless waste of time. I lined them up against the wall, sat down in my chair, and regarded them critically. The youngest was crying already, an unpleasant snivelling sound that grated on my nerves. They were, strictly speaking, innocent, of the crime of which they had been accused. Such were the circumstances of the time, when I was brought innocent people to question, instead of only the guilty. They certainly didn’t warrant execution, but I knew that it was the Gul’s standing policy to execute those arrested of suspected terrorist acts, to deter the rest. I sat there for what seemed like a long time – probably, to them, it seemed even longer – debating over how much longer I could spin this out. Then there were the blasted forms to fill in for the execution. I was freezing and hungry, and I wanted to go home. Or, at least, anywhere but here. But instead I was interrogating children because the soldiers were sloppy and just grabbed the first hapless unfortunates that they saw.

It was then that a horrible thought stole over me. I had missed their ages on the padd. It was entirely possible I had missed something else, something far more important. I made the suspects stand facing the wall whilst I hurriedly dug out the letter again. The date stamp was for over three weeks ago. The meeting that Pruss wanted me to attend was for the day after tomorrow, and, if I were to get there on time, I was going to have to go _now;_ Pruss’ letter had been delayed in transit from the station to me. No doubt I had Dukat to thank for the generally unreliable transmission of my mail. I glanced up at the prisoners again. There was no help for it; I’d catch hell for this, probably, but I had far more important things to do.

I stuck my head around the door and bellowed for Glinn Thondt.

“I want a place booked on the next fast transport back to Cardassia Prime. It’s a matter of extreme urgency,” I called back at him, when he hurried in. He’d brought me my coat, probably thinking that was what I wanted.

“What name sir?” I hesitated briefly, then some impulse, I knew not what, made me throw caution to the wind.

“Elim Kachuk,” I snapped.

“What about these?” he asked, uncertainly.

“I’m letting them go.”

“What! You can’t do that!”

“I can and I am. They haven’t done anything, and I have no more time to waste on this nonsense.”

“But – “

“Shuttle place, then transport to the airport. _Now._ ”

“The Gul’s standing orders are that all suspected terrorists are executed – “

“Glinn Thondt, are you obstructing an agent of the Obsidian Order in the pursuit of his official duties?” His eyes visibly widened in fear. I could still do that to people.

“No, sir.” He saluted and left at a run. I turned back to face four pairs of even wider eyes, all bewildered. They’d probably be dead by the end of winter anyway. And for what? I wondered. I shoved my hands in my pockets and threw all the change I had at them, then hustled them towards the back exit and shoved them out the door. I don’t think I will ever forget the expressions on their faces. They looked so… _disbelieving_. They looked dazed with shock, like they didn’t know what to do next. They were staring at me like I was something impossible. Probably, to them, I was. Snow whipped around their thin bodies.

“Oh here, take this too,” I muttered, throwing the coat after the smallest, and slammed the door in their astonished faces, then ran for my transport; the first rat to leave the sinking ship that was Occupied Bajor, if any of us but knew it. And still, it occurred to me on the long flight back, one with a choice to make.


	27. When things explode

_‘You speak of ordering and perfecting society. But nothing is more precious to a man than the order in his own soul, not even the welfare of remote generations,’ (August 1914, Solzhenitsyn)_

“I can’t believe it!” Bashir protested, as he stomped angrily out of the civic hall, a subdued Garak trailing less energetically behind him. It was the third time he’d uttered that particular explanation in the last five minutes, but he somehow just couldn’t stop himself. “They’re actually going to _trial_ with this! Of all the stupid, ridiculous – “

“Calm yourself, my dear,” Garak murmured next to him, a placating hand at his elbow, “Cardassians do so hate it when people make a scene, and there’s really no point getting annoyed about it.

“Annoyed!” Julian took a breath, and prepared to launch into a new volley of abuse at the universe when he was cut short by Garak’s added,

“This really isn’t like you.” There was a clearly unspoken _Any more_ tagged at the end of that sentence, and Garak was right. The old Julian Bashir – or rather, the much younger Julian Bashir – _he_ would fly off the handle, raging at the injustice of the universe, indignant as if it were a personal insult and disbelieving that the whole galaxy did not share his personal moral creed, but that had been a long time ago. Now, he was older, and, if not wiser, certainly more cynical. He wondered, sometimes, whether this was something Garak found appealing, or saddening. So he heaved a sigh and let it go.

“I know,” he said, “I guess the stress of this is beginning to get to me too. Don’t they understand what they’re doing?”

“What they are doing,” Garak answered mildly, his eyes scanning the streets around them constantly as they walked in the early dusk home, “Is employing the new Federation standards of justice whose virtues your people have been so earnestly extolling to us.”

“What they are doing,” Julian corrected, “Is raking up the past unnecessarily, stirring up bad feeling and civil unrest for no good cause at all, except as a show, to make themselves feel better, to slake just a little of that thirst for vengeance.”

“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

“Is it?” Julian stopped in the street and addressed him directly. “Garak, they’re going to go make a scapegoat of you, you know that.”

“Possibly,” Garak replied, non-committally, “But I still think you’re overstating the case. This isn’t a proper trial, as such. I’m not charged with any crime. It’s just an internal inquiry that they’ve now decided to make public.”

“But why have one at all? I thought the provisional government had agreed to draw a line under all that.” They had too. There had been a few trials of some of the most notorious offenders who collaborated with the Dominion, but everybody knew that if Cardassia started down the road of trying to identify everyone who had sinned against her, it would end up in endless recrimination and vengeance, and so many had been forced to collaborate against their will that a general amnesty had seemed the only way forward. There had been a few pilot truth committees, charged with simply uncovering the facts behind certain events, but of course the person really responsible for it all, Gul Dukat, was beyond any justice now, and Cardassia’s people were too determined to move to the future, or perhaps too caught up simply in the daily struggle for existence, to care about the war anymore, let alone anything from _before_ the Dominion occupation.

“Matters have been raised,” Garak explained, patiently, “From your point of view concerning my past, that I may remind you once held such fascination to you, but from their point of view concerns one of the most sensational and critical dissident trials of the old Empire. Naturally the public wants to know the truth. Naturally they have to find it, or try to. And yes, it is in part a distraction from their current troubles. And yes, half the populace wants to find a traitor, someone to blame, but the other half wants to find a hero, someone to provide inspiration in these dark times. I can’t help but feel that I’m going to disappoint everyone.” His eyes were still darting about the place.

“What are you looking for?” Julian asked.

“What? Oh nothing,” Garak replied, with one of his bright smiles. Julian let it go. Garak’s behaviour was still concerning him, but it was a minor eccentricity, and, besides, even he had to admit that Garak’s occasional paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified. Garak’s statement had got him thinking, however, and recent events had only served to convince him that he needed to take more assertive action himself.

“You would be perfectly justified in claiming that you were unfit to testify due to your current health,” he pointed out, “And I know they won’t believe me, but Dr Parmak has more or less told me that we should be doing that.”

“I assure you, doctor, I’m perfectly well.”

“Oh don’t start that again. Anyway, that reminds me, I have some work to finish up at the surgery, do you mind if I catch up with you later?”

“Not at all.” Another bright smile, and, unexpectedly, even a brief kiss, then Garak carried on alone without a further goodbye. Julian was willing to bet that, even in his current distracted state, he recognised the flimsy excuse for what it was, but he let it go. He chose to believe that was because Garak _did_ want him to help. He also believed that he had to do it without directly confronting the Cardassian anymore and trying to get the truth out of him that way, risking a total breakdown. Garak had to work through this his way, writing and pacing in his attic or whatever it was that helped. Meanwhile Julian had some serious computer hacking to do.

Swiftly, he made his way to the surgery. Parmak had already left for the night, so he unfolded his computer in their shared office, not using the one installed there. If this went wrong, he didn’t want anything to be traced back to anyone other than him, but he suspected it wouldn’t go wrong. There was something to be said for being able to use his full abilities without worrying about _them_ being able to find out, and there was very little to be said for Cardassia’s current security. The only hard bit would be finding what he wanted in fragmented and disorganised results.

So he set about searching, back again to that fatal short time before the Occupation had ended and Garak’s assignment to Terok Nor turned into exile. He still didn’t quite know what he was looking for, but he knew something had to be there that had also been in something Garak had told him.

Trying to extract records of Obsidian Order or even military authorised interrogations was going to be an uphill struggle without knowing precisely what he was looking for, and many would have been deliberately or accidentally erased and lost since then, so, on a hunch, he searched through passenger manifests for military and civilian ships travelling between Terok Nor, Bajor and Cardassia Prime. If nothing else, he could try and track Garak’s movements. For that length of time, there were obviously thousands of journeys, but this time he wasn’t looking for a name that wasn’t there, he was looking for one of five names.

After so much time he didn’t really expect to succeed, no matter what his intuition told him, so it was with a sense of surprise bordering on shock that his search result came back promptly with a fast civilian shuttle service, only a few weeks before the attempted coup by the Tanrith Four and the end of the Occupation, which rapidly turned to real shock when he saw that the name was Elim Kachuk. Garak had actually _used_ the same cover name he had at Tanrith. Excited and triumphant, he almost overlooked the _second_ result, almost two weeks later, for a military shuttle that had been destroyed in a terrorist explosion.


	28. The lovers are losing

_If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire (Francis Bacon, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, Essays)_

It was Rikesh who had convened the secret meeting of our secret society. I confess that when I first found this out, I half-suspected this was another stupid prank of his, which would not amuse Untar, and certainly not me. Our esteemed ringleader had been in the capital on business and cut his trip short to get back here. Having said that, Rikesh had only just returned from a weekend visit to his parents himself. I grimaced. Rikesh was always savage after he’d been exposed to the tender warmth of his family; that, or depressed.

I hurried across the darkened courtyard in the midwinter chill. Tanrith wasn’t as cold as Bajor in winter, but it wasn’t exactly balmy. The warmth and light of Rikesh’s salon was a welcome sight.

Rikesh was dressed as usual in an immaculate and exquisitely expensive, but overdone, suit, and he was standing behind his usual chair, hands squeezing the seat back rhythmically, rocking on the balls of his feet, a grin of – surely – suppressed triumph threatening to erupt across his face. Something unusual was definitely going on. It was a rare display of restraint; he was, however, quiet until we were all seated.

“Well, Rikesh, what is all this excitement about?” Untar asked. He sounded weary.

“How was the capital, dear fellow?” Rikesh countered mildly. A flash of irritation crossed Untar’s face, but he leaned back, steepling his hands in front of his face, considering.

“Busy,” he replied eventually, “More than busy. The government’s been in emergency session over this Bajoran nonsense all week now and everybody is rattled. They don’t like foreign affairs upsetting their lives.”

“It’s going to get a lot more… _busy_ , very soon,” Rikesh said. He was practically gloating.

“Well, go on then,” Durennt interrupted, “What have you found out? Share your amazing secret with us.” Rikesh, clearly, couldn’t contain himself.

“They’re only going to pull out of Bajor!” he exclaimed, bouncing forward in front of his chair, “The Detapa Council will announce the withdrawal from Bajor tomorrow, and the full-scale military evacuation is going to begin in exactly three day’s time.” There was a blurting out of demanding questions, but not from me. I was trying to analyse the sudden deep feeling of relief that had bloomed in my stomach the moment I heard that, discoloured as it was by irritation at the fact that _I_ should have known this, and didn’t. Yet another indication of my diminished status, another snub from the new administration in the Order.

“How do you know this?” “Are you sure?” The questions rattled out demandingly from all of us.

“My _father,_ ” he spoke, riddled with scorn, “Left in a terrible hurry last night. He was awfully upset, quite had to rush his dinner the poor fellow. And my idiot brother got a call shortly after. I listened in on it. They got the orders from the Prefect; it’s been confirmed. It’s happening.”

“Well,” Untar remarked, “That does make things interesting.”

“Interesting, _and_ unsettled,” Durennt pointed out, “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for, and we may not get another. The government _and_ the Central Command both will have mud on their faces and blood on their hands for their chaotic mismanagement of Bajor. They will look out of control – they _are_ out of control. Cardassian citizens everywhere will see this, no matter how hard they try to suppress it, and think of the blood of their fellows spilt not by the terrorists, but by the incompetence of their rulers.”

“Not only that,” Rikesh added, “But the military is going to be completely caught up in the withdrawal. There’s still a sizable civilian population of citizens on Bajor. My father’s entire division has been called up exclusively for evacuation duties. The only force we truly have to worry about is the Obsidian Order, and we have always been a step ahead of them.” His lips curled into a smile. A chuckle from the others, even Untar.

“If we get this out to as many dissidents as we can, we can mobilise them to action.”

“A coup?” Untar queried mildly, as if he hadn’t just uttered the highest treason imaginable, “It may be a bit ambitious for that. But we can certainly cause a _lot_ of disruption.”

“And then the government will look even _more_ out of control,” I supplied, “If enough of the populace joins the protests, it may well escalate into a coup.” There was a brief silence as all contemplated the enormity of this prospect. The Empire had stood more or less in its present form for over a thousand years. And in one week, we would change it all.

“Let us do this thing,” Untar spoke for us all. “Get the word to everybody you can. Get anything organised that you can. And gentlefolk, whatever you do, keep your cover with the Order until the very last minute that you can. But once this begins, the time for pretence will be passed and our actions will speak for our intentions. The only way out will be through. We must carry out this great act to the very best of our abilities, or perish in the attempt. And do not doubt that some will perish. _You_ are the best of the best, and not because you had the best education, but because _you_ are the ones who have fooled the Obsidian Order itself. You have betrayed the Order in its blindness for _years_ , and you will betray it in your actions absolutely and completely in one night, in clear sight. You will betray your family, your friends, you will betray all the principles this Empire taught you to love, but you will _not_ betray Cardassia! And you will not betray her future! All the hopes of generations to come rest upon your shoulders now, and if we succeed, as we must, your names will be those of heroes and your statues will stand tallest of all. Cardassia looks to you for her hopes now; do not betray her, do not forsake her.” They cheered; we all did.

It was a good speech, and watching it, I only had my answer confirmed again. They all believed; oh, the freedoms people think they believe in are not as pure as they believe: for Rikesh, half of it was the desire to destroy his despised Legate father and all he stood for; Durennt truly was more interested in a free market than a free society, and Pruss knew that a boy from the servant classes such as himself had his horizons forever limited in a society such as this – but Untar – Untar had always been the cipher. I had never seen what motivation _he_ could have for this, and now I saw that it was the simplest of motives, twinned ambitions. Untar was a true believer, wholeheartedly. He believed in the cause for the cause itself; he had constructed the fantasy of the ideal government, the perfect society, and in the confidence of the academic who has gone too long unchallenged to think himself wrong, he was thoroughly convinced that it was possible because _he_ thought it was possible, and because it was possible, it was his duty to make it a reality. In the unquestioning ambition of those raised in power and wealth, he never doubted that he could not make what he wanted, and that it would raise him to greatness. And _that,_ is the most dangerous type of revolutionary.

We debated plans long into the night, then parted, one by one, solemnly, with many a clasped hand and emotion-locked jaw, convinced we would never see each other again, but convinced also that we would meet again in triumph in the halls of government, crowds cheering our names outside. It was ridiculous. I didn’t believe revolutions could ever happen like that. Not ones that didn’t replace one tyranny with another. Blood, sweat and toil.

Untar stayed me at the last, when I would have left with Pruss, who had booked a room for us in one of the nearby inns.

“A word, Kachuk,” he murmured. Curious, but not unwary, I stayed. Pruss looked suddenly worried, but I waved him on.

“Passionate boy, isn’t he?” Untar observed dryly, with a nod at Pruss’ retreating back, “Sweet. I do recall.” I merely smiled pleasantly in response. “He’s certainly passionate about you.” I wondered where this was going.

“And the cause,” I added, probing.

“Of course.” Untar wasn’t giving anything for free tonight.

“It was a nice speech,” I complimented him.

“You didn’t believe a word of it,” he countered, and I began to feel the first intimations of danger.

“I never believe anything you say,” I told him, and he barked a laugh, startled.

“Nor I you,” he retorted, with an unpleasant smile, “I never could figure you out, Kachuk. You play the double agent so _well_. Durennt is good, though uninspired. Rikesh is brilliant, on occasion, but wildly inconsistent. Pruss has enthusiasm in abundance, but little skill. But you, my friend, are truly talented. That was why I set that boy to find out what you really were before I could let you in. He didn’t take much persuading. How eloquently he speaks of you, Kachuk.”

“You don’t believe him,” I stated.

“On the contrary, I always believe Pruss. His sincerity is breathtaking. It’s won you over, hasn’t it Kachuk? Even your clever tongue is careless with him, and at last I have figured you out. After all, who has the best motive for revenge against this corrupt state than the orphan, the bastard it rejects?” I made no reply to that. “Oh, your secret is safe with me, Kachuk. The others wouldn’t tolerate you if they really knew, but I care not.” You mean, you don’t care right now, I thought, but you’re more a prisoner of the system that raised you than you imagine yourself to be. Yet I said nothing, glad that he had seized upon the wrong thing, another half-truth that I had let slip to Pruss and came back to serve me well in the end. How ironic, if he only knew who I really was, I could not help but muse.

“You’re not angry with me, are you Kachuk?”

“Of course not. You couldn’t be too careful, I understand that.”

I sat down carefully opposite him. He took a taste of his kanaar, sipping delicately and rolling it around his mouth, savouring it, then knocked back the rest in one large, sensuous mouthful.

“They’ll probably die, of course,” he commented.

“I know,” I agreed, not sure where this was leading.

“Yes, of all of them you’re the only one who has a realistic degree of cynicism, Kachuk.”

“If you’re so certain this is going to fail, why do it?” I asked.

“Because what I said was true. We will have no greater opportunity, not for a long time.” His voice became earnest. “And that demands we take the chance. It demands we must make the sacrifice, if necessary. There will be many such sacrifices, but revolution must begin. The cause must continue. And if they die, it’s for the good of the people. For Cardassia.” Oh he was a true believer, all right, his eyes aglow with alcohol and the flame of his passion, but I noted that he had reverted from ‘we’ to ‘they’, that _he_ had no intention of being a sacrifice. _He_ had a way out already planned, the cunning bastard.

“I’m telling you this, Kachuk, because you’re a pragmatic man. You think like I do. And you and I both know that Pruss won’t be able to maintain his cover for a minute when things hot up. If it’s necessary, I’m taking him out of the equation before then. Make sure you’re not standing too close.” I smiled and got up to leave.

“I won’t be,” I assured him, “As you say, I’m a practical man, and I intend to survive this revolution, whenever it comes.” He grinned, and with that, I left him, heading straight for my room, not sure whether to be angry or amused. I thought _I_ had been the seducer. No wonder it worked so well.

 

Pruss was waiting for me when I got there, a taut rope of jittering anxiety. I pulled him inside without a word.

“He told you, didn’t he?” he blurted the minute we were inside, “That he told me to – to…get closer to you.” There was a high flush in his cheeks and he looked genuinely scared. Scared of losing me, I realised. How little did he know.

“He did. As you told him of my…status.” Pruss crossed to me, arms raised, then lost his nerve.

“I had to tell him that, he would never have trusted you otherwise.” It was the truth, of course, and I hated the taste of it. “I didn’t lie,” he said in a low, fervent tone, increasingly afraid in the face of my silence. “I swear to you, I’ve not been dishonest to you about my feelings, Elim.” As Untar had remarked, the boy really wasn’t capable of that level of deception.

“I know,” I said kindly. What did a little kindness matter at this stage? It was all I had left to give him, if he but knew it. “Untar’s a cunning one. It doesn’t matter.” Relief flooded his face. He looked beautiful, and there was so little time. “Come here,” I told him softly, and he stepped into my arms without question.

I undressed him slowly, savouring every moment, feeling almost a grief rising in me. I wanted to lose that feeling, deny it, keep it at bay just a little longer, so I wrapped myself in his youthful body, and, whether it was love or guilt I do not know, but he responded with everything he had, made me a gift of himself, and I took every last piece of him I could get. In the darkened room, I pushed myself into his body, pressed my face against his, pressing and pressing until I could go no further, as close to being Pruss as I could get; to feel, for one moment, as he did.

_\- ‘You know, in many human fairytales, the boy who saves the kingdom is the bastard son of a bastard son,” Dr Bashir tells me, after we have solved the case of Rugal, little realising to whom he speaks such scandalous things, “Although of course, such distinctions of parentage became irrelevant centuries ago. In fact, I had to look up the old meaning of the word; it was long since mutated into meaning an evil or just thoroughly unpleasant person.’-_

“Elim, Elim,” he murmured continuously, between our gasping rhythm, shudders beginning to run through him, pulling me to a peak I did not want to fall down the other side of, “I love you.” But I did, and fell onto him, his slight frame straining to take my weight. I lacked the will to move. His gaze bored into mine, starry-eyed and devoted.

“Don’t die,” he whispered to me, “Promise me you won’t die in this.”

“I promise.”

_\- Oh but I never saved the kingdom doctor. I never overthrew the evil king. I never saved the princess, or the prince. I never slew the dragon. I am but the bastard son of a bastard man, and you can change the meaning but not the word, and you can change the word, but not the meaning, and if you change them both, then you are talking about something else entirely and that is not what I am that is not what happened and –_


	29. Holding the moth

_‘In dreams begins responsibility’ – Yeats._

 

Julian had, ironically, been pulling another late night in the surgery, ostensibly working but in fact desperately chasing up leads to help him find evidence to present at the inquiry, which began in less than a week. He’d had to call on Kira again for help, and he hadn’t wanted Elim to know. So he hadn’t been at home when the call came through from Dr Parmak and made the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he promised, “Do you need me to bring anything? Should we bring him here?...All right.” He grabbed his medical bag and ran, pounding the streets all the way home in the sultry night heat.

“He’s coming out of it,” Parmak said straightaway, as he burst in through the door, and he squeezed the man’s shoulder gratefully on his way in. He ran lightly up the stairs to the bedroom, where Garak lay still and quiet on their bed, the lights low and a neural monitor on his head. Unable to stop himself, he went straight to him and brushed the loose hair back from his forehead, smiling sadly to himself. Garak hated it when he did that, but it elicited no response this time.

“What happened?” he asked, struggling to control a sudden rush of feeling and remain professional.

“A mild seizure,” Parmak told him, quietly reassuring, “I found him in the attic room when I dropped by. He was sitting at the desk, catatonic. There’s no damage done, as such.”

“This is Odeyn, isn’t it?” Parmak squirmed, seemingly loathe to be the bearer of bad news to a friend.

“It is a characteristic,” he admitted, “If the person is reliving memories and…unable to reconcile versions of events in their mind, they can in a sense effectively freeze up, stuck. It won’t last. The brain resets itself.”

“But it will happen again, won’t it?” Julian asked, bitterly, feeling all that helpless rage come swelling back. This was all the fault of that damned inquiry.

“Until he sorts this out, yes, I’m afraid so.”

“He needs to sort it out in his own way and in his own time, not judged by people’s agendas and exposed in public!”

“I couldn’t agree more, but unless you can persuade him to excuse himself on medical grounds, then I’m very much afraid that that is what is going to happen, and it won’t help.” Julian had almost made up his mind before this happened; now he knew with an absolute certainty what it was he had to do, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“Tain?” Garak said, softly, making all the hairs on Julian’s arms stand on end, “I did as you asked…” By the look in Parmak’s eyes, he was just as disturbed.

“Elim,” Julian said, quietly, taking his hand and squeezing it tight. Garak’s eyes half-opened, focussed unsteadily on him.

“Ah, doctor,” he murmured, quietly, “I didn’t lie to you, you know.” Julian had to smile.

“About what?”

“The implant. I said it was to make me immune to torture, did I not?” Julian hesitated.

“Technically, you said that it was to make you immune to _pain,_ ” he said, candidly.

“Ah, you’re right of course. How strange to have misremembered. But well, I didn’t lie; it did. It did.”

“Yes,” Julian said, unsure this was going, and not liking it, “What about the implant?”

“I wonder if that was the best lie after all, or if it was the worst…”

“Elim?” The eyes were flickering shut again.

“You’ve shut it off, haven’t you? That must be why I feel so terrible.” Julian swallowed around the painful lump in his throat.

“Years ago, Elim.”

“Yes. I remember. I remember…what you said.” The eyes shut, and the grip on his hand, that had briefly tightened, went slack again. He carefully put Garak’s hand back down, feeling caught in his own memory trap. He’d forgiven Garak, when he’d never even known what he was forgiving him for, and he couldn’t go back on it now. Neither could he find the man responsible for this. But he could find something – someone – else.

“I need you to look after him for a bit, can you do that?” he asked Parmak, voice tight. Parmak’s brow furrowed in concerned confusion.

“It would really be best if you were here for him.”

“I know, but I can’t be.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“I’m damned if I’m letting Elim’s political enemies be the ones to decide his fate in that courtroom. If he’s going to be judged like that, then _I’m_ going to be there and _I’m_ going to have my own evidence.” Now that he had decided, there wasn’t a moment to lose. He kissed Garak briefly, then crossed straight to the closet and began throwing a few things together into a travel bag. A bewildered Parmak trailed after him.

“But where are you going?”

“To Bajor. There’s a witness I have to call, and I have a feeling they’re going to take quite a bit of persuasion.”


	30. Sins of the father

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a total idiot and managed to miss out a chapter somehow. This is the corrected one posted in and the rest should now go back in order afterwards. Gah!

_We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be (Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)._

Three days. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it felt so long. I returned to the capital to find that there was an aura of almost unbearable tension in the city. The Detapa Council, probably seeing that it had no possibility of keeping the withdrawal a secret, had already made the decision public, and the military, who were furious not only that they hadn’t made the announcement themselves, but also at being overruled, itself an event almost without precedent, were making angry accusations, bleating about civilian incompetence and security concerns. Gul Dukat was on every monitor screen in the capital, throwing blame every which way he could away from himself. Kotan Pa’dar was on every other monitor, calmly explaining the (to my mind perfectly rational) reasons for their abandonment of the Bajoran colony. For the first time I could remember, vast crowds gathered eagerly around the monitors, with doubtless many thousands more captivated by their home sets, gaping at this unprecedented public display of divisiveness.

The Detapa Council and the Central Command had always presented themselves as a model of unity; the reality of course was far from the truth. There had been a long, ugly power struggle going on for years, exacerbated by the slow chipping away of the military’s power as their resources were drained in the disastrous Federation war and Bajoran Occupation. Like a couple that presents a united front to a marriage that had long since fallen into acrimony and contempt behind closed doors, until it suddenly disintegrates completely, all their dirty laundry was being aired in public, both sides having completely abandoned their usual censorship in favour of trying to look like the wronged party, the ones who had been right all along.

I had never seen such scenes as I did in that short week. It wasn’t only our rulers that were quarrelling like children amidst the wreckage of their spoiled party, but the civilians were shouting and brawling like bar drunkards telling the world their grievances. Untar had been right. Now was the perfect time for the dissident movement to strike. With no little skill and effort, I had finally gleaned the outline of the plans for ‘Operation Rise’ (I’m afraid so). Every dissident group, cell, every lone individual, was to be mobilised in this grand attempt. There were to be hundreds of acts of sabotage, primarily of military and civil targets, from the small scale to the outrageously large, and it was all to kick off on the day of the withdrawal, when only minimal military forces were available, the bulk of them being tied up with the evacuation.

I was furious. Utterly furious. Tain had left and those fools in the Order had let this slide and carry on until now they had a potential revolution on their hands! I had handed over all the information I had; I had tried to see some senior representative as many times as I could, but to no avail. After Tain’s departure, the Order was largely in the hands of those others of his former associates who had been his most favoured protégés; five others who had always been rated slightly less than me and had clearly always resented my influence with Tain. They were more than capable in their own right, I will not deny it, but it seemed clear to me that they were not cut out for more senior, managerial roles, and that they were letting this personal resentment override their professional judgement.

It was going to be up to me to sort out this mess, I could see that. Oh the Order would mop up those dissident groups that were about to make their presence known, that at least they would do, but they would miss the key players, the ones that really counted. They would miss the Tanrith Four, because Untar was almost as clever as he thought he was, because they were the untouchable Sons of the Empire incapable of betrayal, because Tain was gone, and because nobody had read my report. Up to me at the last, and, if I don the unaccustomed habit of honesty, I will admit that this more than anything irked me, agonised my soul. I didn’t _want_ to be the one to do it, because whatever I did, it would in some way be a betrayal, and I just wasn’t sure of who or what I was betraying or serving anymore. I had some junior agents that I could call upon; I was not so fallen from favour already that I could not do that. But it would be me leading the operation. Me taking the responsibility and the guilt. I, doing my duty as I always did my duty, and finally showing Tain the proof of my skill, when he wasn’t even there to see it.

So caught up was I in that problem, that I failed to see a more real and present difficulty: that the dissidents I was working with, or dealing with, were not trained as I was; they did not have my discipline, the sense of organisation and skills of coordination of the Order, or even the Central Command. I expected their plans to go wrong, to fail, as it was thwarted both by the Order and myself acting on behalf of the Order. I hadn’t antipicated that they would go astray even before that.

 

The full-scale evacuation of Bajor began; the city was alive with the roar of ships arriving and departing the main port, to say nothing of the orbital activity above, the troop movements in the street. It was hard to make my way through the throng, and the sense of chaos and pandemonium jarred utterly with the ordered way of life I was accustomed to. It was almost like being on Bajor itself. In approximately one hour’s time, I knew, there was supposed to a series of coordinated explosions at military installations throughout the capital, and many more in other major cities. An opening sally in the war to wrest power from Central Command. One of the reasons I knew this was because my own part in this supposed revolution was to plant one of these bombs at the spaceport.

I am quite an expert at explosives. It should come as no surprise to you, doctor, considering what you know of my actions since we met. After all, did I not skillfully rig an explosion with such precision as to destroy my own shop without seriously injuring myself, with a device exactly calculated to raise the right suspicions? Did I not destroy Senator Vreenak’s shuttle, with a device that clearly implicated Dominion involvement, and let a damning data rod survive just well enough? To say nothing of the innumerable crude but effective devices I made and planted whilst I was fighting the Dominion. I suspect it does surprise you, even so. Explosives seems so unsubtle for me, do they not, constable?

_\- ‘The only common enemy you and I have is Tain. The difference is that you don’t see it,’ -_

Yes, explosions: so melodramatic, so loud and attention-garnering. Those skills of mine that were always held up to the light were always those of an interrogator, but I was not always an interrogator, just as I was not always a tailor. I used to be a gardener – ah but wait, that was later, no, earlier, well, it depends to what you compare it.

I also blew up a shuttle containing the daughter of a prominent military official. You remember I told you doctor? Except that I did not. It was the son. Oh, I made the device. I made the device very carefully and very skillfully, stuck in a planning room with Rikesh and Untar on the eve of his laughable little coup, maintaining my act until the last (or was I keeping my options open?) – and I made sure that it would not work. I am very clear upon this point. I remember it quite distinctly sitting on the table in Untar’s little basement workshop – how many cellars with bombs in have I sat in? I have lost count now – and I quite distinctly recall leaving out a rather crucial component so that the device would fail to go off. I would plant it somewhere at the spaceport in the morning, and then my agents and I would arrest the Four, catch them red-handed; Untar and Rikesh first, because they were already here, Durennt next, and, finally, shortly after he travelled down from Tanrith, having mobilised the student activists there, Alor Pruss. Simple.

I had slipped out late at night to make my final preparations, and was now heading back, early in the morning, so early still and yet so much activity already. It was going to be difficult to get to the spaceport and past security, but it didn’t matter anymore. My communicator bleeped, and I answered it automatically, suspecting it to be an update from the Order. It wasn’t, it was Pruss.

“You shouldn’t be calling me,” I said, automatically, “What is it?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to be late,” he told me.

“ _What?”_  Who on earth phones to say they’ll be late for a revolution, for goodness sake?

“Things have really kicked off here already, Elim. The military have routed some convoys through here because of some problem with the coastal road and it’s impossible to get a direct flight or transport or anything. I’m on my way to get a train but it won’t arrive until 09:40.” I hesitated a brief instant. I happened to know that the station was due to have an explosion at 09:45. He’d be in the middle of it. Was it part of my furious desire for revenge at these people who had forced my loyalties and hurt my conscience that made me speak? The desire to have him live, so that I could see the expression on his face when I came to arrest him for high treason? Garak thought so. It was sentiment that made Kachuk speak, however.

“No, don’t do that, it’s not safe.”

“Why not?” I took a deep breath.

“Things are happening that I don’t have time to explain, and this line isn’t secure. Don’t come to the capital. Just lie low in Tanrith. I’ll come to you later.”

“Er, if you’re sure, what about Untar…”

“Alor, just do as I say. Wait for me there.”

 

 _Fool_ , I thought, as I cut the line, and wondered to whom I was referring. Something in me just hadn’t let me knowingly let him get blown up for no reason at all, by some stupid coincidence. That wasn’t what I was in this for. That wasn’t what I was suffering for. I’d pick him up later, once we’d got the others. I’d go myself. I owed him that. I owed myself that.

And even as I thought that, the sky lit in a sudden brilliance of light, followed belatedly by a colossal noise, as a large Kaelor-class shuttle detonated in the upper atmosphere. The revolution had begun early, and I ran swiftly back to our base of operations, calling for my backup. There I found Untar gone already, and a giggling, sobbing Rikesh huddled on the floor.

“What’s going on?” I demanded, a very queasy feeling in my stomach. My bomb was no longer there. It was _gone._ I hauled Rikesh up from the floor and slammed him against the wall. “What have you _done?_ ”

“I killed him!” Rikesh gasped, “I finally killed the bastard! Ahaha!”

“Rikesh, you crazy fool, what have you _done?_ ”

“I blew him up! I blew up my father’s shuttle!” I almost dropped him in my disgust and shock.

“You idiot!” I seethed, “There would have been hundreds of civilians on that transport! All the Kaelor-class shuttles are evacuating the civilian presence alongside the military. All you’ve done is alert the military early and helped turn the populace against us!”

“I’m sorry Elim I used your bomb, I had to, anyway it had a fault that I had to fix and – “ I struck him, a hard backhand across the face. He looked at me with the same wide-eyed hurt that, as a child, must have been in his eyes when his father first hit him, and I didn’t care even slightly. Footsteps rattled up the stairs; not the heavy boots of the military but the softer, subtler shoes of the Order. The door opened, and two junior security I was expecting came in, as well as one senior operative I was not. One of those five favoured ones, with an undisguised look of contempt on his face.

Rikesh, who had never been stupid, no matter his instability, launched himself at me with an incoherent shriek, and I knocked him to the floor.

“Traitor!” he spat, with the same twisted resentment that, as an adult, he must have looked at his father with, and that, I almost did care about. I had never defied my own father, and, like so many other things, it was beginning to feel like a mistake. I waited until security had taken a screaming Rikesh away, and then addressed the senior agent, who had remained.

“So, I take it someone finally took my report seriously.” His smile was not a pleasant one.

“Oh, we’ve always taken the threat presented by this little group very seriously.” My instincts were screaming at me that something was very wrong indeed.

“How gratifying to hear that. I suppose that you have the others in custody already?”

“All bar one,” he replied, then appeared to reconsider, “Possibly two.” It was clear as crystal to me then, and I felt nothing but a cold anger.

“So, you intend to take all the credit and ensure my status in the Order remains a lowly one. I’m hardly a threat to your position, and I’ve served the Order loyally for years, but in any case, I would hope your patriotism would outweigh your personal ambitions. You do not serve Cardassia if you serve yourself first.” He cocked his head to one side, seeming to find something amusing in the statement.

“Nobody doubts your skill,” he replied, “But there are those that have questioned your loyalty for some time. For myself, I do not care to speculate. But I’m sure it will all be sorted out at the Order headquarters. I hope you’re not going to make a scene like your friend out there, and come qui – “ Then he was staring at me, surprised, from the floor. I struck again, and knocked him out. The cold anger had turned to a sick churning in my stomach. It had never occurred to me that my allegiance would be questioned, no matter my own private doubts. I could well believe that certain people would spread false accusation about me for their own selfish ends, but I didn’t think it would be taken seriously. However, perhaps now that Tain was no longer in charge….no, but it would be clear from the records that he had given me this assignment, which had remained open, and which I had dutifully carried out to the best of my abilities….a test of my _skill,_ he had said. Had he had doubts even then? We Cardassians have a saying, doctor: the flavours of betrayal are as varied as all the fruits of autumn, but its taste is always bitter.

The noisy chaos on the streets outside was entirely drowned out by the roaring in my own mind. What an extraordinarily blind fool I had been. Rikesh would loudly denounce me as an Order spy, but would the others know who had betrayed them? No, only the mentally unbalanced one. I had released Bajoran terrorists to get here in time for a coup, and now a military transport carrying a senior Legate and his Gul son had been destroyed by a bomb that _I_ made, and, even as the Order prepared to arrest Pruss when he arrived, he was hiding out in Tanrith, because _I_ had told him to stay put. _I_ had warned him. And I had just knocked out a senior Obsidian Order operative, because I knew I had but one chance of redemption: to get to Pruss before they did and arrest him myself, or for both of us to flee.


	31. A mirror image of himself

_‘The trouble with a mirror image is not that it’s a reflection, it’s that it’s reversed.’ (Kurt Vonnegut, A Scanner Darkly)._

 

Julian walked carefully into Garak’s office, up in the attic, slightly annoyed that he’d come home to find that Garak had not only discharged himself but resumed working again. In the face of the apparent restoration of his rationality, however, Parnak had had no choice but to let him go, Julian understood that.

He paused at the top of the stairs. Elim had made such an effort with the office; in fact, it was this room, more than any other, which had drawn Elim’s enthusiasm when they had finally been able to find a place to move into together, and he had furnished and decorated it with some care. Light furniture, pale walls and airy transparent netting on the windows; contrasting dark, solid colour paintings and abstract silver wire gossamer sculptures. Julian liked it. Garak was sitting at the desk right now, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed.

“Elim?” he said, uncertainly. The eyes opened and he smiled. “How are you feeling?” He knew Garak wouldn’t appreciate the question, but he couldn’t help himself.

“A little better,” Garak replied, and his voice sounded strong, at least. “How was your trip?”

“Productive,” Julian replied, provocatively; if Garak get to keep his secrets, so he could he.

“The hearing is the day after tomorrow,” Garak told him, “And I am told that instead of marching down to the Archon’s offices this morning to demand a medical exemption for me, you informed them you would be presenting evidence for my defence.”

“That’s right,” said Julian, ignoring the chair in front of the desk in favour of pulling up one next to Garak. “And as your defence council, I need you to tell me some things.”

“Such as what?”

“If any transcripts or recordings of the interrogations of the Tanrith Four still exist.” When Garak didn’t reply, he added, “Specifically, of Alor Pruss. I’ve searched exhaustively for the others, and as far as anyone is aware, the recordings of all four were held at Central Records and were destroyed either when the Order fell or later, in the Dominion bombardment. But the one for Pruss was noted as a copy, and it was also dated about a month later than the others, which means that the original must exist somewhere else.”

Garak regarded him through hooded eyes; if Julian had hoped to provoke a reaction out of him with his knowledge of the Tanrith Four, he hadn’t succeeded. “Does it not occur to you that perhaps such a transcript might be of more use to the prosecution?”

“Look,” Julian tried, “Just so you know: I don’t care. I don’t care what the truth is anymore, and I’ve frankly given up trying to find out, but it can’t help but strike me that Tain didn’t exactly welcome you back after a month, did he?” A flicker of a smile passed across Garak’s face, but it was a pained one.

“Alor Pruss escaped the initial rounding-up of the dissidents,” Garak said at last, “He actually succeeded in stowing away off-world and was on Cardassia Four, hiding out courtesy of some distant relations, when the Order caught up with him, as you correctly surmise, about a month later. Due to the importance of the trial he ordinarily would have been brought back to Prime, to Order headquarters first, but there was a need for haste, given Tain’s retirement – “ another flicker of that pained, private smile, “ – So his interrogation was carried out on Cardassia Four in order for the case to be prepared before he was brought back to Prime for the trial. If you want your transcript, it may still exist at the records bureau there.” Julian made no reply to that; he was disturbed by Garak’s frankness. It seemed indicative of the air of fatalism that had settled over the Cardassian, so at odds with his usual optimism. But then, now that Cardassia was liberated, what did he have to fight for, except himself? And clearly, he didn’t think he was worth it.

“I’m not going to give up on you, you know,” he declared, fiercely, even though he knew Garak hated such open sentiment, “I know you don’t see it, but we’re going to win this. _You_ , are going to be exonerated, and justly so.”

It was Garak’s turn not to reply. Instead, he uncrossed his legs and got up, walked over to the window.

“Do you know,” he said, suddenly conversational, “I’ve worked out what it is about this room that so appealed to me. At first, I just couldn’t place it, but now I wonder why I didn’t see it before.”

“Er, what’s that?” Julian asked, nonplussed.

“By some strange coincidence, or, probably, just unimaginative architects, it happens to have the exact same dimensions and layout as Tain’s old private office.” Julian felt a wave of something like revulsion pass through him.

“That’s…creepy,” he replied, “Please don’t tell me this meticulous decorating of yours has also matched all the furniture and the positions of the paintings on the walls.” Garak gave back a bark of laughter.

“Actually,” he said, sounding genuinely amused, “I appear to have reversed everything. Come on,” he added, turning to go, “I fancy a decent dinner for tonight. Let’s treat ourselves.” Julian didn’t hear that. He just stood there. He knew. He knew. Garak turned back in the doorway, looked enquiringly at him. He smiled, took his arm, and followed.

 


	32. Eye of the Beholder

_‘Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.’ (John Le Carre)._

Ah, Tanrith! When last I saw her, on that cold, wintry evening, she stood stark against the cloudless sky; a blood-red sunset that was marred instead by smoke and the contrails of countless craft. The regular, civilian transport services had been utterly disrupted; both speed and stealth being of the essence, I had travelled across-country to get here on the back of a riding hound, for nearly five hours straight, and I was extremely sore-backed and cold by the time I arrived.

My unconventional mode of transport had, however, at least ensured that I did not arrive right in the centre of the little town, but rather on its outskirts, which was just as well. The revolutionary fervour had spread rapidly here too, and there were signs of disorder and damage all through the streets. The military police were struggling to keep control, engaged in running battles with student activists who threw bottles and stones – stones! – their scarves wrapped around their faces. I had no desire to get caught up in all this…nonsense. Replace order with chaos? What kind of progress was that? These dissidents had so many fancy ideals and notions of their perfect society, but they had no real idea of the practicalities involved in constructing such a phantasm, and it would remain anarchic. No matter; I had other more pressing matters to deal with, and I made my way carefully through the quieter back streets, to approach Tirioch college from the rear, through the garden gates near the river. I knew that Pruss had been bunking on a student friend’s couch at our former institution for the past few days, planning their little acts of rebellion together from his rooms. I could only hope that he had done as I had asked and stayed put.

Tirioch had prudently shut its gates and locked its doors against the trouble outside, but it was an easy matter for me to make my way in and pad silently up to the third floor. The whole college seemed empty; if there were any students not rioting or fled to some other safety, they were hiding. Room 326; I knocked softly, not wanting to surprise anyone, particularly, and dreading what I might find. There was a muffled noise from within as someone approached the door and doubtless looked through the spyhole, then it was unlocked and Pruss was pulling me urgently inside, trying to kiss me in the doorway. I pushed him away and made sure the door was shut behind us. He was alone in the room, fortunately; his friend was probably out with the rabble. I checked that the corridor was still empty, then turned to face him, and realised, then, that I didn’t know what to say.

Pruss took one look at my face, and I can only imagine how grim my expression must have been, for something broke in his and he walked backward to sit on the couch, his own face a study in dismay.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” he asked, before I had assembled my thoughts, “They’ve found us out. They know.” And I saw, then, that I had one last chance to be kind – one last, cowardly lie I could tell, to spare us both.

“Yes,” I said, setting myself on the path to damnation. He clasped his head in his hands; he looked fraught, worn out.

“I knew it,” he said, sadly, “I knew it when you called this morning and warned me, that it must have gone wrong. The Order know, don’t they? They’re coming for us.”

“Yes,” I said again, “Yes they are.” _They are already here, standing in front of you._ No, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t lie, not this time. There was too much at risk and not enough time; I had to take him into custody now. I couldn’t wait for somebody else to do it. I certainly couldn’t let him go. I had to break his heart and forget my own, as well as kill him. For Cardassia.

“You shouldn’t have come here!” he exclaimed, oblivious to the source of my distress, and rose again and took my hands all in a rush of emotion, “You should have just got away and saved yourself. You shouldn’t have come back for me. I know you’re always trying to protect me but I can take of myself; I have a way out.”

“Alor – “ I began, disentangling my hands from his own, “You have to come with me. You have to – “ There was a noise from outside, and I stopped, instantly on the alert.

“What is it?” Alor whispered, sounding frightened.

“Stay here,” I told him, “I’ll go look.” I drew out a phaser, and whatever protest he had been about to make died on his lips. He withdrew further into the room, as I carefully unlatched the door and peaked out. Dusk was falling, and the long corridor was gloomy, lit only by shafts of the fading sunlight; dust motes glinted redly in the air, and that preternatural quiet of the lying silence hung over all. There was someone here, I was sure of it, and it was too much to hope it was just some student creeping back in. They were faster than I would have anticipated, if it was one of Tain’s protégés, but they were already too late, and they would not get the jump on me. It could very well be some other threat though, and I couldn’t afford not to check.

Keeping to the shadows, I stole towards the stairway, a horrible feeling of disquiet settling over my shoulders like a cloak. The wall opposite the stairs threw up its own shadow, monstrous and distorted, of someone who had no need to hide, and I could hear, now, the heavy tread on the staircase, several pairs of feet; that could be a problem and –

The first of them reached the top and rounded the corner into view, and my phaser involuntarily sagged in my hand. It was _Tain_ striding towards me, in a unhurried pace that turned into a slow death march in my mind; Tain, with that terrible cold anger in his eyes, as his agents streamed past him and ran to Pruss’ room. _Tain_ , who came to stand opposite me, saying nothing. One of the agents ran back, and I already knew what he was going to say.

“The suspect has made a run for it, sir, we’re in pursuit, but he seems to have slipped past our net somehow – “ _The attic,_ I thought, belatedly, and I still do not know if I would have said it, but Tain spoke first.

“I think you’d better come back with me, Elim. We have some things we need to discuss.” And then, there was no point anymore.

 

The revolution was over before it had even begun. The Obsidian Order devastated the dissident movement in a blow it would never recover from; raiding cell after cell, arresting thousands, seeming to know exactly where to be, and when; exactly who to take in. It was perhaps the greatest triumph in the history of Order, and for the architect of it all, his last glorious legacy. Many people have faked death. Tain was the only one I knew who had faked retirement. The brilliance of what he had done still astounded me.

The withdrawal was over too; the military brought back within our borders to lick its wounded pride and reinforce martial law on the streets. Everything was going back to normal, back to the way it had always been, but even more severe, so as to never let this happen again. A lifetime was over, and once more I was in Tain’s office.

“Well, Elim, what a very educational exercise this has all been.” His voice was as mild as ever I heard it, and cold enough to freeze a Breen. “Did I not tell you to be careful what you let other people put in your mind? Such a suggestible, fanciful boy you were, and now look what’s become of you. Your head is as filled with ridiculous notions of democracy and progress as that of any addled and cossetted praelector’s son.” I was numb. I knew that nothing I could say would make him believe me. I had lied too often and too well…yet if I had told naught but the truth every day of my life, still I knew, he would not believe me. He had always expected failure of me, who was his own one, enduring failure.

“Well this isn’t like you. Nothing to say?” he pressed. I raised my eyes to meet the seering immediacy of his distant gaze.

“What can I say? The evidence is in front of you, you’ve read my account of my actions. I _did_ the task you set me to do, despite being kept utterly in the dark, and if there’s fault to be found, it is only perhaps that I did a little _too_ well.”

“Yes, too well by far. You were so very convincing, Elim, every bit the revolutionary, do you wonder at my suspicion?” Anger flared.

“I wonder only when I became so skilled at lying that I could fool even Enabran Tain.”

“Lies, Elim?” Never have I heard so much contempt in one man’s voice. “Lies? No, your problem is not that you have told lies, but that you have told half-lies, not-quite falsehoods to cover the not-quite truth. A man who tells lies merely seeks to hide the truth. A man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he has put it1.” It stung. He got up slowly and walked round the desk to look at me one last time.

“You will have to leave.” I was jolted out of my numbed silence.

“Leave what? The Order?”

“You will have to leave Cardassia.” I felt the blood draining from me like sand from an hourglass, time slipping away from me, _home_ already receding into the distance. It was the worst punishment. Tain had the gift of elegant simplicity in his cruelties too. How I hated him in that moment.

“I am loyal to Cardassia,” I whispered, anguished. _I love Cardassia._

“But the Cardassia you see isn’t real, Elim, it’s just another lie, a place you made up from your overactive imagination and those stupid books you read. It doesn’t exist.” He glanced briefly at me. “And it never will.”

I walked silently from the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: I am letting Tain quote from Lawrence of Arabia here, because it was too good to pass up.


	33. Hamlet of Kings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're picking up after my last update, you may wish to go back to chapter 30 due to my idiotic self missing out a chapter - not that it was essential to the understanding of the fic, but it irks somewhat that I missed that when posting first time! Sorry!

_‘Heroes are always deviants.’ (Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect)._

The case for the prosecution was pretty devastating, and hearing the lawyer’s summation of it only served – as was no doubt intended – to highlight this fact. Garak had answered minimally or refused to answer most of the questions put to him; it was the product of fatalism and that instinctive secrecy, Julian knew, but it made him look guilty. He would have a lot of work to do.

“To conclude,” finished the lawyer, “The man you see before you, Elim Garak, was employed by the Obsidian Order for the majority of his adult life, and was moreover in a position of great power there for a length of time dating at least back to the Bajoran Occupation, answerable only to Enabran Tain, the Head of the Order, himself. This is a fact, ladies and gentlemen of the court. It is not in dispute. It is not as though he can be excused on grounds of being a lowly functionary, of having no choice, of simply doing his job, as so many were compelled to do. This was a man who excelled at his profession and took pride in it, someone who interrogated – most probably tortured – not only Bajoran terrorists but Cardassian citizens. Some doubtless were guilty of crimes against our people but all? I have presented to you the case that this is not so. Under the directions of Tain, he interrogated Dr Parmak and obtained from him the names of Cardassians involved in the early dissident movement then operating from Kirsk University. Whilst Dr Parmak himself, in his eloquent testimony, has graciously forgiven his interrogator, the fact remains that this information was obtained and _it was acted upon._ This again is not in dispute. I have shown you evidence that Mr Garak, under the pseudonym of Elim Kachuk, infiltrated the dissident movement at Tanrith University, and was involved with that circle known as the Tanrith Four – it is not only possible but highly likely that he was the notorious ‘fifth man.’ It is a great pity that the records of the Order on Cardassia Prime have largely been destroyed, for if we could see the names on those arrest orders, the transcripts of those interrogations, and who carried them out, then I suspect there would be more facts that weigh against the defendant. Nevertheless, I invite the inquiry to consider the following in their own conclusions: that this man was known to be a loyal and trusted member of the Obsidian Order for years; that he interrogated and obtained the confession of a known dissident member; that he became associated with the Tanrith Four – and that subsequently all the members of this group, plus many leaders and followers of the dissident movement, were exposed and arrested in a major operation carried out by the Obsidian Order, but _he himself was never arrested, charged nor punished._ The case for the prosecution rests.”

 “This court calls Dr Julian Bashir to the stand for the defence,” announced the court official, giving Garak his first shock of the day, Julian was sure. He’d taken over from the lawyer at the last minute. He didn’t want anybody else doing this. He took a breath, and began his argument.

“Arrested? No. Charged? No. But punished – oh yes, he was punished. For the defendant was exiled to the space station Terok Nor shortly before the trial of the Tanrith Four. Why would Enabran Tain punish him, if he had committed no offence? And why the lack of a public trial? Ladies and gentleman, the answer is a simple one.

I first met the defendant on the space station to which he had been obliged to flee and make his home. He was the only Cardassian there, and it was a miserable existence for him, surrounded by Bajorans who despised him, but if this was not fame enough, he was notorious above and beyond that for one thing and one thing only – for _lying._ Everything you have heard, ladies and gentleman, everything you have witnessed here today, is part of a great lie – a lie told to the head of the Obsidian Order himself, for years and years. And it was a lie that was found out, tragically, at the last minute, when the dissident movement, which had been gaining strength for years precisely because it had informers within the Order itself, notably the Tanrith Four, was at the last exposed. And Tain – who had embarrassingly promoted the defendant – _his illegitimate son –_ “ a gasp ran around the public gallery, as he’d thoroughly intended, - “above many others, would have been made to look like a fool if it ever became public. He could have had Mr Garak quietly murdered, one supposes, but exile was a far greater hurt to a patriot, and, perhaps, deflected suspicion from his error, and this would not be the first error Tain had made – how much easier to explain it away as the result of an indiscreet affair, or simple incompetence.

“A number of events, and a number of actions, simply do not add up unless you consider the possibility the defendant was a double agent. For my first witness, I would like to call to the stand Professor Natima Lang…”

 

And so it proceeded; he built his case as well as he could, although the prosecution’s cross-examination was hard, and Garak himself remained stubbornly silent, leaving his fate entirely in the hands of others. His eyes never left Julian’s form; staring at him as though he were a complicated and possibly important cipher that he couldn’t quite figure out.

“To summarise my case so far,” Julian concluded at last, on the third day of the trial, “Here is a man of known intellectual and literary tastes, forced from familial loyalty and lack of choice into a career with the Order, to be shaped into a tool of his father’s devising, employed at his will. A patriot; a man who wished above all to serve Cardassia. A man who did what so few in that time ever dared to do – to _question,_ and, beyond that, to _rebel._ What survives of his service record with the Order before that time is impeccable, but of course it would be – if there had ever been any hint of irregularity before, then his punishment would have come far sooner. No. I do not pretend to know when his sympathies with the dissident movement were engaged, or when it was he was swayed to their side, but swayed he was, and then he played the most dangerous game of all. To pretend to be that which he was not, which he did so very, very well indeed, until, at last, with the exposure of the Tanrith Four, it all collapsed and he was left with ruins.

But if we cannot detect his true nature from his actions before his exile, we can certainly see traces of it afterwards. Most notably, in his refusal to kill or arrest Professor Lang and her students, renowned dissidents. Superficially, he did his duty in informing the authorities, maintaining his cover as always – but at the last moment, he let them go. Had he turned them over, he could very well have gained a pardon and ended his exile, but he sacrificed that for what he perceived to be the greater good. Then too, as we have heard, when Major Kira Nerys was kidnapped by the Obsidian Order as part of an elaborate plot to expose the key dissident leader, Legate Tekeny Ghemor, it was Garak who informed Starfleet of her location, and Garak who aided them both in their escape, killing a senior Order agent in the process. Why would be have bothered, when he could have pretended ignorance of the entire affair and both Starfleet and the Bajorans would have been none the wiser? Finally, he was key to exposing a plot by Gul Dukat to disgace Kotan Pa’dar, a moderate, reformist politician. At the time, I and I’m sure many others around me, explained this away as part of his intense personal hatred of Gul Dukat. But was it? It is true that Garak interrogated Dukat’s father and became embroiled in an affair which – supposedly – led to his exile. Perhaps he simply disliked Dukat for what he represented – the military, the old ways. Perhaps he saw before the rest of us the true evil in Dukat’s soul. Or perhaps – perhaps it was just another lie. Hating Dukat enabled him to take actions that were in favour of the dissident movement, and moderate members of the Detapa Council, whilst making it look as though he were simply taking actions against Dukat himself. Hating Dukat – was a good excuse.” He paused for breath and a mouthful of water, aware that he had only one more card to play – possibly two, if luck fell in his favour, so he had better make it a good one.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the court, by your leave, I have one more witness to call. I have said that we have little evidence of the defendant’s true nature before his exile, but we have some. I call upon Nadan Prel to take the stand.” Garak started very slightly at the name; he _had_ recognised it, but the movement was so subtle Julian only saw it because he was looking for it. He turned around and waited expectantly as a short, thin Bajoran man nervously stood up, his coat clutched in a bundle in his hands, and approached the stand, apparently unable to take his eyes off Garak.

“State your name please,” said the court official.

“I am Nadan Prel,” the man said, his voice high and wobbly, “I am a – a shopkeeper from Dakor province on Bajor.”

“Mr Nadan,” Julian began, smiling warmly at him to try and put him at his ease, “Do you recognise the defendant?” Nadan swallowed hard.

“Yes sir I do.”

“Could you explain the circumstances in which you know him please?” Nadan drew himself up a little, appearing to recover, although his eyes darted about nervously.

“From – from Bajor,” he began, unclearly, “I – it was during the end of the Occupation, shortly before the Cardassians left. I was twelve. Myself and my brother and some other children were arrested by the troops for, well, I don’t know what for, we didn’t do anything. But they arrested us because we lived on the streets and brought us in to be interrogated.” His voice shook again. “The defendant was my – my interrogator.” A murmur rippled around the courtroom.

“And yet you’ve come all this way to speak in his defence, why is that?” Nadan looked briefly bewildered.

“Because you asked me to,” he replied, honestly, and, out of the corner of his eye, Julian saw Garak actually smother a brief smile.

“But why did you agree? Could you tell the court what happened?” he asked again, patiently.

“Oh. Sorry. It – it was a long time ago, but I remember very clearly. I was very frightened. I knew the soldiers would kill us after he was done – everybody knew that they had standing orders to do so – and I was afraid of that and that we’d be tortured first. But he didn’t. He asked us some questions about who we were and what we’d been doing. Then he made us face the wall for a moment. I was too scared to do anything other than what I was told but my brother peeked and he told me that he saw him reading a letter and that he looked dismayed. That was his word – dismayed. He called in one of the soldiers who brought him his coat and demanded that he book him a seat on an express shuttle back to Cardassia Prime.”

“Can you remember what name he gave?” Julian asked, intently.

“Yes sir. He said his name was Elim Kachuk.” _Thank you,_ thought Julian silently.

“If the court will go to page 86 of their evidence, they will find a copy of the shuttle manifest that lists Elim Kachuk as a passenger,” he said.

“What happened then?” he asked Nadan.

“He let us go,” Nadan said simply, staring at Garak again.

“He let you go? But I thought the standing orders were that you were to be executed?”

“Yes sir, and that’s what the other soldier said too. They argued but I think Mr Kachuk outranked him – he said he was an Obsidian Order agent – and he got his way. Then Mr Kachuk let us go. He let us out the back door and he even gave us all the money he had his pockets. It was snowing, and he gave me his coat.”

“What did you think of that?” Julian asked, gently.

“I couldn’t believe it. None of us could. We were sure were going to die. No Cardassian had ever shown the slightest compassion to any of us. None of them. But he did, and we didn’t understand why. He said we were innocent, but that wouldn’t have mattered to the others. I thought the Prophets had sent him to save us. I thought he was an angel. I was just a child, you understand.”

“You said he was in a great hurry to leave after reading the letter,” Julian repeated, before the prosecution could butt back in, “Perhaps he just wanted to get rid of you quickly.” For the first time, Nadan stood up straight and his voice was firm.

“I thought about that,” he said, “I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and it seems to me that he could just as easily have given us to the troops to be shot, and it would have saved him the time and possibly some hard questions from his superiors. That is what a bad man would have done, or even just an ordinary man, obeying orders. I can only conclude, that he was a kind man. We were children, and we were innocent, and so he spared us. So when you came to me I thought – I have to go. I have to go back and tell what happened, because no matter what the Cardassians did to me, to my people, I owe him my life, and my brother’s life, and I won’t be an unkind man myself.”

“Thank you Mr Nadan,” Julian replied, quietly. “No further questions.” Nadan stepped down from the stand, but instead of returning straight to his seat, or leaving, he approached Garak and offered the bundle in his hands.

“I brought your coat back sir,” he said, quietly, “It saved me from freezing to death that winter. I’m sorry it is rather worn.” Garak cleared his throat briefly, and pushed the coat gently back.

“It was a gift,” he said, simply.

           

“The burning question remains,” Julian continued, when Nadan Prel had taken his leave, looking like a man whose ghosts had been laid to rest, “Why was the defendant in such a hurry to leave. Look again at that passenger manifest; look at the date. That is a mere _four days_ before the withdrawal of Bajor began, four days before the Tanrith Four mobilised the dissident movement and there was rioting in the streets – four days before it all fell apart. And Garak receives a communication from Prime four days before this all happens? And urgently has to return from where he’s been effectively lying low, conducting interrogations on Occupied Bajor? Could this be a coincidence? I believe in coincidences, ladies and gentlemen of the court. Coincidences happen _every day._ But I don’t _trust_ coincidences. No, the timing is too exact, and what happens next is too telling.”

He saw, out of the corner of his eye, someone enter the court, padd clutched in hand, and nod discreetly at him. It was all he needed.

“Let us go over those last few fateful days. The dissident movement is mobilised as the defendant returns urgently to Cardassia. He has been out of the loop with the Obsidian Order – conducting interrogations on Bajor, operating out of Deep Space Nine, then Terok Nor – _ostensibly_ as a demotion for his indiscretion in an earlier affair. Now everything is happening, he receives word to return. But he is no longer privy to the information circulating at the highest levels of the Obsidian Order – he doesn’t _know_ that the dissident movement has been found out, exposed. He doesn’t even know that Tain is still running the show; as far as he knows, Tain has already retired. But Tain hasn’t retired, and he has finally become suspicious of Garak’s involvement with the Tanrith Four: the Order is about to undertake its biggest operation for seventy years.

“Garak returns to the capital, where he presumably meets up with some of the dissidents. Nantek Untar, the ringleader, and Filarek Rikesh, at least, are confirmed to have been present at the time. As the withdrawal of Bajor begins, the Obsidian Order makes its move: Untar and Rikesh are arrested almost immediately. Durennt follows shortly after, but he probably has time to issue a warning. Garak, familiar with the Order agents carrying out the operation, realises that it has all fallen apart. He escapes, and he almost certainly warns Alor Pruss, his lover, may I remind the court, not to come to the capital, as has been previously arranged. Pruss does as he’s told and lies low in Tanrith. Garak somehow eludes capture – does he flee for Tanrith, to aid Pruss? Does he escape to his own bolthole? Or does he fly back to Terok Nor, effectively engineering his own exile? Until just this morning, I thought that I would have to leave that up to the court to decide, since Mr Garak has refused to testify, or for it to forever remain a mystery, but now I have new information to submit, which I think concludes the case.

“Ladies and gentleman, whilst it is true that the transcripts of the interrogations of Untar, Rikesh and Durennt have not survived, that of Alor Pruss _has._ Assisted by Professor Lang, and the able staff of the Central Records office of Cardassia Four, we have been able to recover it. For Alor Pruss was the only one of the Tanrith Four who managed to escape Cardassia Prime – somehow, he had help – and he fled to relatives on Cardassia Four. Order agents later tracked down and arrested him, and, for the sake of expediency, his interrogation was conducted there. His record was thought destroyed with the others on Prime – but that was just the copy. I have here the original, and I submit it to you now.”

 

Julian thought he would never forget Garak’s face as the transcript of Pruss’ interrogation was read out. He looked defeated. He looked guilty. He looked like a man who had been worn down to the very last threads of his soul. It was meant to be his great moment of triumph, but he only half-listened to the words. He desperately wanted to get Elim out of there, away from all this.

_…‘State your plan for the record again please.’_

_‘We were to infiltrate the intelligence services…we were to become Obsidian Order agents and pass names and information onto political dissident groups…’_

_‘What were the names of your accomplices?’_

_‘You already know! You’ve already got them, I know you have!’_

_‘State the names, please.’_

_‘…….’_

_‘State the names, please, for the record….there was another man wasn’t there? A fifth man?’_

_‘No, no, it was just the four of us! Just..the four of us.’_

_‘Come now, this persistent lying does you no good. We’ve been over this before. We know there was a fifth man, and we know who he is, we already have him in custody, but we want you to state it. For the record. For your trial.’_

_‘Elim Kachuk – oh gul, Elim, I’m so sorry! He warned me. He told me to stay in Tanrith and he came to get me out of there, but the Order found us. They took him and I ran. I ran and I left him there! He helped me escape and I know it must have cost him his own freedom – now look how I’ve repaid him! He was the best of us. The best. There were times when I was convinced he really was an Order agent, he played it so well, and I feel so guilty that I ever suspected him…but you know, he was so good! You would never have found him out if we hadn’t failed him.’_

_‘You don’t feel guilty for aiding dissidents?’_

_‘No, I only feel guilty for betraying Elim. Only for Elim.’_

The inquiry closed. They found Garak suitable. The vote was overwhelmingly in his favour. He made his apologies, said he had found reliving the past a stressful ordeal and was excused. The assembled members all stood as he passed, in respect, but he walked like a man on his way to the gallows.

 


	34. Postcards from a Young Man

_‘History must at last convince of the uselessness of insensate mass movements riding roughshod, now as ever, over anonymous suffering and claiming priority in the name of some newly clothed abstraction. If it does not teach that, it does not teach anything.’ (William Gerhardi, A Historian’s Credo)._

Humans view their lives the way they view their memories; as a linear progression, from beginning to end, birth to death – with the interesting stuff happening in the middle, one event after another, like walking, one step after another. Cardassians – well of course Cardassians view their lives in a linear fashion. We _do_ exist in linear time, after all, unlikely those meddlesome Prophets. We just don’t _remember_ them in a linear fashion, and therein begins the art of self-deception, perhaps. One step after another, I had always considered myself to be walking in a linear fashion, as the steps of my present slipped into the past, and my foot landed down in the future, now become the present. How amusing then, to find that one has been walking, as though lost in the woods, in a slow, wide circle after all, back at the beginning. Death and birth are, after all, so closely interlinked.

Before I ever became a revolutionary…I was a revolutionary, and anything else begins to feel like it was a mere diversion down a dead-end path. Now, hunkered down in the doorway of a house in the middle of the capital, the night filled with the noise of battle in the distance and civil uprising in the immediate surroundings, my unlikely band of comrades beside me – Legate Damar, Colonel Kira, mixed numbers of eager youth and grim, battle-hardened soldiers alike – I have finally brought Cardassia’s long-delayed revolution. If only Untar could see me now. If only _Tain_ could see me now! It’s worth a smile, a grim smile in the phaser-punctuated dark. Kira glances at me, and I can see the recognition in her eyes. Yes, my dear Bajoran freedom fighter, the universe at large _does_ have a sense of humour, and, as we always suspected, it is not the nasty perversity it always felt like to you and I, but a deep, rich irony. It has been strange, these past few weeks, how I have felt more in tune, in sympathy with her, than any other of our band of rebels. She could conceivably have left us to our own recognizance some time ago, gone back to Starfleet, or at least the Bajoran militia, having shared her experience, but that’s not her way. She always engages her heart, and, somehow, never loses her strength for it, and she’s in it all the way, just like the rest of us.

“We’re still three miles from the command base,” I tell her. I know this place even in the dark. We are sheltering in the alcoves afforded by the central library, great statues of former literary giants dwarfing our crouched forms; the largest collection of non-military statues in the city. Truly, in my life, I took much solace from Preloc, but I never expected to take shelter behind his great marble boot.

“That’s not that far,” says one of the young ones, enthusiastically, and us wise and grizzled folk manage a dry chuckle between us, sounding briefly as though the statues were colluding on a joke. But we know to keep our silence.

“It’s going to be hand-to-hand fighting the whole way from here on in,” Damar tells her, taking pity on that youthful enthusiasm, and waving a cautioning hand to keep the noise down, mirroring the Colonel, if he but knew it.

“Well I hope you know the quietest routes,” Kira says, unconsciously shouldering her plasma rifle to a more comfortable position.

“Hmm, yes, but not necessarily the safest ones. I’ll take point.” She nods agreement.

The sky suddenly lights as a great ship explodes above us, harbinger of the great space battle taking place so close to us, so far away…this is going to be bloody, for everyone. Despite myself, my mind flits briefly to Julian, up there somewhere…our paths diverged, for now and probably forever. How can it be that the circle one describes in one’s life can somehow come to exclude all that was formerly within it? Will I have nothing left? I shake the feeling off. When this is over, I must remember to tell him about Preloc’s foot, but I never do.

“I’ve got your back,” Kira says quietly, as we clamber down to street level.

“Good,” I say, meaning it, and swing out ahead, to reclaim the streets; to reclaim Cardassia –

_\- Ah but memories do not end in the convenient chunks afforded by the structure of novels, do they? -_

Street by street, hand by hand, and yes it’s bloody; bloody and relentless. Our only saving grace is that the Jem’Hadar, so rigid in their organisation and discipline, are now falling into their own state of desperate semi-chaos as battalion after battalion of Cardassians turns against them, as they struggle to run hither and thither, carrying out the Founder’s ever-increasing demands.

_\- Running through the streets, the whole world descended to chaos, trying to make my way out, my way to Pruss, to just get there in time, only then it was bright daylight, no cover for my sins, and now it is -_

_\- Darkest night, the black of space, and I am on a Federation spaceship on its way to attack my own homeworld, no to liberate it, this is to free my people from the Dominion and Starfleet is the only way to help me do that –_

_\- The lights are too bright, the lights are set too bright on Terok Nor now. Before, it was dim, and warm, a stifling, claustrophobic pretense at home, but now it is peopled by these spindly aliens and the temperature is cold, the cold comfort of exile, and the light is the light of nowhere left to hide –_

Shadow to shadow, we flit down the streets. We engage in running battles with several small groups of Jem’Hadar, and, as we round a corner to a plaza – the riskiest part of the city we must yet traverse – I think for a moment we’re finished as a roiling battle spills in from the other side, dozens of Jem’Hadar exploding into the streets like a tide of grey lava, but there are Cardassians with them, against them, fighting them. For a crazed few moments we meet in the middle, and I can feel the spray of a fountain dampen my heated back.

_\- Walking here as a child, with Mother and Father, and Mila laughed as I splashed in the waters with the other children, a rare indulgence, from that more than maternal vigilance, that knew she could never protect me, not completely, not from him and what he would make of me, and so sought to teach me at least survival -_

_\- The fountain in the central quad of Tirioch college is tinkling away, completely oblivious to the turmoil unfolding outside its walls, and within the hearts of those still left within. Pruss – what am I to do? I feel as though I am running to my doom, no matter which choice I make, and it is only at that moment that I realise, appalled, that I am still deluding myself that there is a choice to be made. All those choices were made long ago. The choice of what I am, and the choice of what I must do, and it is only that, in the heart, they conflict -_

I knife a Jem’Hadar straight in the throat, slitting through the tube that supplies his ketracel white, and it sprays briefly in my face. I taste it on my tongue, strange and greasy-sweet. I’ve got blood sprayed in my face many times before; this feels so much more alien and disturbing, somehow. Even as I shove him off to deal with another, I feel someone approaching at my back. I cannot turn in time but there is the brief flash of phaser fire, and he drops into the fountain, dark staining the waters like spilled ink. There isn’t time for a nod towards the Colonel. We battle on and suddenly we are out of the square again, running off the main street, left and right and left again, down into an alleyway and ducking behind some upturned bins. For a moment there is only the sound of people trying desperately to get their breath back, soft curses over injuries and clicks of weaponry.

“I gatecrashed a party once but never a fight,” someone says, imprudently. I glance back; we appear to have lost three people and gained five more. Irony, sweet irony, are all my revolutions to be a bloody farce? Everybody looks a bit confused, apart from Kira and Damar. He grins, almost manically, and she shrugs.

“The more the merrier, as I believe the humans say,” I say, and rise to move on. Only just over a mile now. We might actually make it, and when I find those Founders, father, I’ll make them _pay._ All my life I’ve been running towards a future not of my own shaping. And if you think that anyone, _anyone,_ can influence what you call fate and what your descendants call history, for anything worth a damn at an individual level, then you’re an egotist or a fool, but all the same, I’m determined that this time, the future I’m running towards will be the one I’ve chosen – just as I know that it is bought too late, and at a price none of us wanted to pay.

 

**End Part IV**


	35. In our stars, not in our selves

** Part V: Consider Phlebas **

 

_'I am a lie that always tells the truth,” said Jean Cocteau. ‘To go beyond mere facts, to record a true history that takes account of the unseen as well as the visible, Cocteau saw that the writer must create something that, on the face of it, is a fabrication.’ (John Burnside)._

 

Somehow, Garak had managed to give him the slip in the chaos outside the courtroom; it was left to Julian to issue a statement to the waiting reporters, an independent news service itself a new institution in Cardassian society. When he finally got home he found Garak sitting at the kitchen table, which was something of a relief, since he’d half-expected him to be in the attic office again, or gone entirely. But no, he was just sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the open door to the garden, the very picture of ordinary domesticity.

“Hello,” Julian said, uncertainly, as he came through the door.

“Hello,” Garak replied, slightly absently, and getting up to go to the replicator. “I was just making some tea. Would you like some?”

“That would be lovely,” said Julian, watching him as he retrieved the pot and two cups and saucers, and planted a brief kiss on his forehead as he sat down. He’d expected – he wasn’t sure. Grief, guilt, anger, accusation, or even total withdrawal. But then, Garak had already been through all that. What he saw now was the calm after the storm. Tired, but washed clean. Everyday. He took a sip of the tea and only then realised how tired he was from all the talking, how every muscle ached with slowly-releasing tension.

“God that’s good,” he said. Garak smiled faintly.

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing.” They sat in a comfortable silence for a little while longer; the last scent of the fallen flowers wafted through the open door.

“I found a fruit growing this morning,” said Garak, “I meant to tell you earlier.” He put his cup down. “May I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Did you know the truth when you went in the courtroom that morning? Do you know now? Because what I hold in my mind and what I saw there this day – how shall I put it – are startlingly contrasted.” Julian smiled ruefully.

“A wise man once told me that he didn’t believe there was such a thing as the truth. I remember at the time I didn’t understand what he could possibly mean.” A trace of Garak’s usual manner re-asserted itself.

“Doctor, I thought it was your general aim these past weeks to make me _less_ confused.”

“Everything I presented was the truth. At least the individual facts were.” Another dry smile. “They were scattered like crumbs across this table we regularly share. All I had to do was put them together.”

“Doctor, you’ve constructed a fantasy.”

“I learnt from the best.”

“So it would seem. How long have you known?”

“Actually, I didn’t know the answer either way. I just gave one version of the answer. This is what the defence does. The prosecution gives another answer. It’s up to the court to weigh the evidence and decide which answer it favours.”

“And this you humans call justice.”

“No. This we call the law. Justice is only an approximation to it, like the will of the majority is only an approximation to democracy.”

“Does that make it possible to be a traitor and a patriot at the same time?”

“Yes, but you’ve always been a patriot, Garak, you know that.”

“Then what do you think really happened?”

“At the end? Did you betray Pruss, or Tain, is that what you’re asking me?”

“Since we’ve agreed that the truth cannot possibly be known, I would, shall we say, be interested in your perspective.”

“I don’t think you had time to find out,” Julian said simply, “If you want the human perspective, which I suspect you already know, then the answer is the one that you once gave me a long time; the only person you betrayed was a man named Elim. For Pruss, maybe in fact but not in feeling, and as for Tain – only in your heart, as a son never should do to his father. But you’re a Cardassian, and I think you can live with that, because it was a sacrifice for the State, after all.” Garak regarded him through narrowed eyes.

“And yet what is the State but the people?” he retorted, though mildly. It sounded like a quote, but Julian couldn’t place it.

“That sounds like it was said by someone who had a great deal of certainty about them,” he said instead, probing a little.

“I cannot believe you dragged that poor Bajoran into the courtroom,” Garak said instead, changing the subject. Julian chuckled.

“He took some persuading, but he came up to me and thanked me afterwards. He said he had finally made peace with his past.” Garak snorted.

“Nice to know _someone_ has.” There was a lull in the conversation.

“Tain said it was a test,” Garak said at last, unprompted, “A test of my _skill_. But it wasn’t. It was a test of my loyalty, one that he always expected me to fail, and that is the one thing I can not answer. _Why_ did he suspect me, then, at the start, when I had been the most unfailingly loyal of all?” The question hung in the air, ending on a note of anguish that was only half-disguised, and that more through habit than necessity. Julian waited. “What was it he saw? Did he perceive my changeable nature, my susceptibility to radical ideas? Or was it simply that I had always been his mistake, his weakness?”

“Elim,” Julian said quietly, “Where did _Tain_ come from?”

“Pardon?”  
“Who was he? From what family, of what profession? How was he recruited into the Order? Who did he know? Who _was_ Tain?” Elim blinked, but was only briefly disconcerted.

“Don’t you think I tried to find that out before? He erased his identity so effectively that he had never been anything other than the Obsidian Order.”

“Something that I imagine would be of great benefit to the Order,” Julian said, probing cautiously. “In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of senior Order agents had no family…after all, that way, you have fewer loyalties that might compromise you.” Garak said nothing. “It’s easier to erase your identity when you don’t have a family to start with,” Julian added, still in that quiet tone, wary of the unstable currents flowing in Garak’s mind. Elim’s eyes narrowed.

“That he was…connected to a powerful family, I have no doubts,” he said at last.

“Yes,” said Julian, “It took a lot of scanning through the surviving medical records, but when you know what you’re looking for, it’s relatively easy to run a DNA comparison.”

“You cannot possibly have a record of Tain’s DNA,” Garak interrupted, “He would never have – “

“I have _yours,_ ” Julian said simply. Garak actually frowned.

“Don’t tell me you _found_ something.” Julian laughed a little, wryly.

“Actually no. I was sure that I would find something to link him to someone – I thought maybe Untar, but there’s nothing. If there ever was something, it’s gone forever. Tain it seems came from nowhere, and went back to nowhere at the last.” There was a pause; Julian was thinking of the Dominion internment camp, with less than fond memories. He couldn’t speculate as to what Elim was thinking, or rememebering.

“Why Untar?” Garak asked at last, directly to the point.

“Because it was Untar he must have suspected from the start,” Julian continued, “I cannot help but think he must have at least have disliked him, possibly detested him. No matter what you think about Tain’s professionalism, no matter the mask he wore, he was still an ordinary man, with an ordinary man’s frailties, and an ordinary man’s weaknesses for forming personal attachments, personal enmities and personal…judgements.” He looked expectantly at Garak.

“This isn’t about Untar,” the Cardassian replied at last, “It was only ever peripherally about Untar.”

“You know what I thought when I…when I was there with Tain, and you, in the prison camp,” Julian offered, feeling on shaky territory but at the same time knowing this was the only way through, “I thought: he’s like Cronus.”

“You’re going to have be more specific than that, doctor.”

“In ancient Earth mythology, the god Uranus was castrated and overthrown by his son Cronus.” Garak winced.

“This isn’t another one of those ghastly morality tales you humans inflict on your children is it?” Julian smiled, pleased at the joke.

“No,” he said, more confident now, “But it was prophesied to Cronus that he would in turn be overthrown by one of his own sons. So do you know what he did?”

“Something melodramatically gruesome, no doubt.”

“Yes. When each of his children were born, he _ate_ them.”

“Gruesome _and_ disproportionate. Is there a point to this? A lesson in good table manners, perhaps? If so, I have to tell you it didn’t work.”

“Garak, did it ever occur to you that Tain didn’t trust you simply because you were _better_ than him? That he was shrewd enough to see it, but not clever enough to predict where it was going to lead? That he could only ever see it leading inevitably, somehow, and too soon, to his own replacement? So he controlled it. He controlled _you_ , as much as he could. And he set you up to fail, before you could succeed too well.” It scored, and he could see, behind Garak’s eyes, the pieces rearranging themselves. He watched as Elim carefully set his empty cup down on the table, looking out the window thoughtfully.

“Julian, I intend to go to Tanrith tomorrow,” he said, after a little while. Well, thought Julian ruefully, it wasn’t as if he’d expected an acknowledgement of it.

“Care for some company?” he asked instead. Elim smiled gently.

“I don’t think so, thank you Julian. This is, as you humans say, something I have to do for myself.”


	36. Remember me lover

_‘The mark of the immature person is that they want to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature person is that they want to live humbly for one.’  
(William Stekel)._

I had bought my tickets for travel after leaving the courtroom yesterday, before the news spread, although I made sure that I was seen. How strange it was to return to that place, once so familiar and now – still familiar, but changed, like us all, I suppose.

I made my slow way to Tirioch. I was not in a hurry. I concluded my business in the college offices, which proved surprisingly swift – Cardassia isn’t as in love with forms as she used to be, and then wandered into the grounds. When I entered the gardens, I found them in a sorry state; the vines had grown out of control and the beds had lost their exquisite organisation. The fountain was dry, and the stone cracked in places. Someone was making an effort, however; the borders had been trimmed and there was evidence of recent planting. We wreak our destruction upon each other, and then we pick up our lives and try to put them back the way they were, and, though we fail, before long there is no one left to remember it was any different. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off those high, circular windows I recalled so well, below the roof where I had first kissed Alor Pruss.

I went inside. It was a relatively easy matter to slip the locks; security, never anything more than cursory, had lapsed further, and all the students had not yet returned from their holidays. The place was quite empty; it made it feel deserted, but this was an illusion, a lie, I knew. In a couple of weeks time, it would be filled with the free laughter, overblown angst and earnest discussion of youth again. How different this new generation would be; how scarred by the past, and yet, somehow, how unconstrained by it.

I stood at the top of the stairs where it had all ended, and put myself in the mind of my prey. I saw Elim Kachuk; no wait, I saw _me,_ crouched there by the top of stairs. I saw Tain ascending, with that deliberate, heavy tread, the agents beside him…and I saw Alor. He would have been at the doorway of his room, the door opened the barest crack and his wide, terrified face pressed to it. He would have seen Tain accuse me, the agents coming, and there are surely more, guarding all points of exit…. _the attic!_ he thinks to himself. So he slips from the door and runs to the other end of the corridor.

Here and now, I follow him. He will be just in time, as he hastily throws himself into 301: ladies bathroom, not even thinking that somebody might be in there until the door is already flung wide. He is in luck. Nobody wants to have a bath when there’s rioting in the streets. He scrambles through the panel and into the attic space, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind him. He is in a panic, because they have caught Elim and it is very likely that they will catch him. He realises he is leaving footsteps in the dust, and in the same moment, he thinks: _I have the photograph in my pocket._ The one Elim wanted him to destroy but could never find. The one he always carried with him, because he was a sentimental fool. For a moment, he does not know what to do, and he just stands there. If he tears it up they will find the pieces, and a crazy thought of eating it comes to him, but no, he has a better idea. The model is just up ahead, and he has a clever thought. He finds a gap under the roof, and shoves it inside, into the little attic. Then he moves on.

I watch his ghost as he squeezes around the boiler, and finds the counterpart door on the other side, the one we never went through, that leads up to the roof on the west wing. I pull at the miniature version of that roof on the model; faded now and mouldy in places. It is stiff but the glue has long since rotted through, and the whole lot lifts up in my hands. There is a curled and yellowed piece of soft plastic inside. I was right. It’s faded almost beyond recognition; the face of the young man in the picture is an almost featureless blank, erased of identity, but I recognise it, nonetheless. Just. I sigh, and an old pain resurfaces, just for a moment. The air is as thick and close as if it had never changed since last we were here. I can almost inhale the ghost of his passing.

I follow him up onto the roof. He is young; he is fit and he is desperate, and his head is filled with all that romantic literature he reads. So he does not even hesitate but swings a leg straight out over the parapet and fumbles for a foothold. I walk around the edge until I find a place where the vines are thickest. They would have been thinner then, but enough, I fancy, for his light weight. There is a large chip on a windowsill further down, perhaps where his foot grasped for purchase, perhaps nothing at all to do with him. I watch as he disappears at last from sight, jumping down to the small side road, and making good his escape, running into the bloody dusk. For a moment, triumph fills him. He has escaped, and surely Elim will too, because Elim is the best, and he _always_ escapes. Perhaps one day, when the revolution is over and he and Elim are heroes, they will come back to this place, and they will find the photograph, and they will laugh about it. But Elim is already gone, and soon he will be too. His thread in this tapestry is finished, and he runs only to his own unravelling.

I look across at the opposite rooftop, and for a moment, I let myself remember us standing there in each other’s arms, filled with our foolish dreams, when I had allowed myself to hope. Then I let him go, and leave him with his brief dreams, so soon to flicker out. But I was a dream he carried with him until his death; I was never tainted in his eyes, and, for the first time, I found myself glad of that. One can lie for goodness’ sake, too.

I look up at the sky; the blue is deepening to red in the sunset, and the scattered clouds catch the light. There is still beauty here; but it feels as out of reach as ever. But still, there is no architect; there are only the designs we make for ourselves. I am content, and so now, I just wait. It isn’t long before I hear quiet footsteps behind me.


	37. Know where to run

_‘We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push button and the human act. We have to_ touch _people.’ (Jacob Bronowski)._

Julian went to the surgery in the morning, because there was nothing else he could think of to do, and there was always work to do. So he doled out vaccinations and routine examinations, in between trying to tackle the mountain of paperwork that he had built up whilst the investigation had been going on. He was worried about Garak, even knowing the Cardassian would dismiss his worry out of hand. And a question nagged insistently at the back of his mind. A question that formed itself as: _What now? Where do we go from here? What happens next?_ Of all the questions he had wanted answered, it was still the one he most yearned to know the answer to, and didn’t have. Everything had changed – hadn’t it? Garak had said last night that he was withdrawing his candidacy from office, so, in a way, the whole thing had been pointless. Well, maybe not entirely pointless; he’d said something about a position with the newly formed civil service, the foreign ministry…he’d been typically vague, and Julian had been so tired, he’d just wanted to sleep. He’d meant to ask him in the morning, but when he’d risen, Garak was already putting his coat on to catch the train, and he’d got only a murmured, ‘See you later,’ and a brief kiss.

Julian had come here to assist with the Federation disaster relief effort, and ended up staying on an extended commission. But he was still part of Starfleet, and sooner or later, they would re-assign him – or perhaps he himself would find an opportunity too good to resist – and then what? He didn’t want to resign Starfleet, but he loved Elim too much to lose him, and he knew, too, that Garak would never give up Cardassia again, not after he was finally home after all the long years of his exile. Morever, Julian knew, it would be unfair to ask him to. Perhaps he would just have to accept that in this, he would be the one to make the sacrifice when the time came to it. Well, he supposed it would work out in the end, no point brooding on it again.

By the time Dr Parmak came in for the afternoon shift, Julian was engrossed in a neglected trial report and almost didn’t hear the door.

“Gracious, Julian, you’re not working _today,_ are you?”

“Hmm? Oh, well, there’s lots that needs doing.”

“I thought you’d be home. With Elim.” Julian looked up then; Parmak looked diffident, awkward, as he often did when he was about to ask a personal query. “How is he?”

“All right, I think,” Julian said cautiously. “He seemed fairly calm yesterday anyway, and he didn’t wake in the night.” Parmak gave an uncharacteristic snort.

“I don’t know whether to throw all my data on Odeyn Syndrome in the bin or write a paper on that man. He never does anything the conventional way, does he?” Julian smiled and put down the report.

“I didn’t get a chance to thank you properly, for speaking at the trial,” he said. Parmak looked almost embarrassed.

“There’s no need to thank me,” he muttered, “I fear what I had to say was not very helpful in any case.”

“It was the truth,” Julian said, and watched as an ironic smile flickered across the Cardassian’s face.

“Yes well I’m not sure Garak has as much appreciation for that as you and I do.”

“He appreciated you speaking, regardless.” Parmak ignored that.

“I can manage here today, you know,” he said instead, kindly, “Perhaps you and he should spend some time together today.” Julian shook his head.

“He left early this morning.”

“Left? To go where?”

“Tanrith,” Julian replied, absently, already turning his attention back to his report, “I offered to go with him but I think he wanted some privacy. I think he has a few memories to put to rest, to be honest, so I didn’t raise a fuss. It should be beneficial for him.”

“What a strange coincidence,” Parmak remarked, taking his own seat.

“What is?” He frowned again, looking a little guilty.

“Oh, well there was someone I wanted to talk to after the trial. One of the witnesses. They were a member of Kirsk University’s dissident group, you know, and I felt I…owed an apology after my…my confession…well, I don’t know that it incriminated any of them, not directly, but still.”

“I’m not getting the coincidence.”

“Oh, well, I happened to bump into her on my way here and she was on her way to Tanrith as well, that was all.”

“Who?” Julian asked, with an icy feeling starting to crawl down his spine. Parmak looked surprised.

“Why, Professor Lang, of course.”

“God _dammit_ Garak!” Julian almost shouted, springing from his chair.

“What is it?” Parmak cried in alarm, rising more slowly.

“I’ve been a fool,” Julian cursed, “And trusted to appearances. You’d think I’d have learnt better than that by now.”

“I don’t understand!” cried Parmak, chasing after him.

“You said that the dissident group you told Garak about at Kirsk had ties to another group at Tanrith University, right?” Parmak visibly paled.

“I’ve…said something I shouldn’t again, haven’t I?” he said, looking pained. Julian’s face was grim.

“No – _I_ did. And Elim must have known it, good god he knew it right from the start. Come on, we may not have much time.”


	38. To thine own self be true

_‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ (Solzhenitsyn; the Gulag Archipelago)._

“Professor,” Garak acknowledged, calmly, and turned to face her. She is dirty from her crawl through the attic and, not unexpectedly, she holds a phaser levelled at his face.

“I always wondered if we might meet again,” she says.

“I didn’t,” he replied, breezily. He feels quite back to his old self. Over her shoulder he can see, on the lawn, two distant running figures. So, Julian figured it out then. He knew he would.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“That distracted academical air was always a most convincing lie, madam, but it never quite convinced.”

“When Parmak revealed the link to the student dissident group at Kirsk it was completely destroyed! I only escaped because I had been on sabbatical for over a year beforehand and they had nothing to connect me to it. I swore long ago that if I ever found out the identity of the agent who betrayed the liberation movement all those years ago, I’d kill him,” she stated, coldly and clearly.

“Good for you.” His reply is clearly not quite what she expects – either that, or his relaxed demeanour isn’t.

“Is that all you have to say? Don’t you care?” she accused, some of that remembered passion coming back to the surface, “Don’t you care what you did? Don’t you even care that you’re going to die?” Garak considered this for a moment.

“Is that _really_ what you want to know? What I _care_ about? What possible answer could I give that would satisfy you? And what do you care about, madam? Justice? Revenge? The truth?”

“I _care_ about Cardassia!”

“And so do I,” he shot back. A look of contempt crept into her eyes.

“Is that what you’re going to argue? That the truth doesn’t exist? It certainly didn’t in that courtroom yesterday! That it’s all a matter of perspective, and we were both trying to help Cardassia in our own way? Well you may have fooled that doctor of yours, and you may have fooled Pruss, but you never fooled me.”

“If I didn’t fool you, then I must have fooled Tain instead, and it was hardly to my benefit,” Garak pointed out, reasonably, and, suddenly, a certain confusion entered her face.

 _Ah,_ thought Garak, with a flood of remembrance, _I used to be good at this. Making people take apart what they thought they knew and put it back together again the way I wanted them to._ But that – is not why he came here today, nor what he does, anymore – although it is what he will do again, someday, in some fashion, of that he suddenly realises and is decided at once. If he lives that long. He smiled a wan smile. “Perhaps, in the end, the only person I fooled was myself.” Her gaze hardens again and she nods at the photograph in his hand.

“No excuses. That young man and all his family are dead!”

“Yes he is! And how do you suppose Tain knew about him? Him and his little group at Tanrith, when Parmak was based at Kirsk?”

“You dare accuse – “

“Is this about _my_ guilt, madam,” Garak cuts her off, “Or yours?” Lang looked like she’d been slapped in the face.

“You can’t prove…you can’t know...”

“No, and neither can you. Still, I trust you subsequently learnt the importance of isolating your cells. After all, _you’re_ still here, and all those others aren’t. Rikellan, Hoag…Pruss.” The look she gives him is one of pure hatred.

“You really are a despicable man.” Garak sighed.

“Professor, if you’re going to shoot, I suggest you get on and do it. _You_ haven’t got all day.” He nodded meaningfully in the direction of the roof door. They can both hear a distant pounding on the stairs – for a moment it reminds Garak of that day, long ago, when Tain came for Pruss. But Tain was gone. And Julian – Julian was still here.

“What do you think your little Federation doctor would do if he really knew the truth about you?”

“The same as he always does, and he knows the truth about me better than anyone.” There is a scuffling coming from the attic. “Madam, you have always possessed what I have not,” Garak stated calmly.

“And what is that?” she asked, her face still a study in contempt.

“The courage of your convictions.” As if that firms her resolve, she lifts the phaser again, but the rooftop door flies open and Julian almost falls out in his haste.

“So did Untar!” Julian yells, rather desperately, running to stand in front of Garak, completely unarmed, of course. “So did Untar, and Tain, and so, above all, did Dukat.”

“You’re comparing me to Dukat?” she asks, incredulously.

“No,” Julian says, gasping for breath but regaining his composure quickly. Behind him, Parmak stumbles out onto the roof, and comes to stand uncertainly between him and Lang, his hands half-outstretched in a silent plea for restraint. “No, but I am saying that the absolute certainty that one is right, is perhaps one of the most dangerous things of all. It blinds us to the truth, to ourselves, and to the real consequences of our actions. We must live in uncertainty. We must doubt ourselves, or we will never question that what we do is truly right, and we will never see that history is, as Preloc once said, a mirror-sided story.” Garak looked admiringly at Julian; a man who, above all, exemplified the courage of his own convictions. No, he reflected, it was his _principles_ he stood by – and therein lay the critical difference.

“He has blood on his hands,” Lang retorted, “You don’t get much more solid than that.”

“We all do, Natima,” Parmak said, wearily. “None of us is innocent.”

“Look at the photo in his hand, doctor,” Lang said to Julian, “Look at the photo of that young man. That’s Pruss, the lover he betrayed. Don’t you understand what he did? You can’t even begin to imagine what he’s capable of, what he’s done.” Julian didn’t look at the photo, but instead continued to meet Lang’s ferocious gaze with the same calm equanimity that he had once faced a pain-enraged, embittered Garak.

“For whatever it was he did, I already forgave him, a long time ago,” he said simply.

“And can you speak for the dead?”

“No, but neither can you, and forgiveness must start somewhere, with someone, or there will only be more wrongs; more wrongs that added up never put anything right.”

“Natima…” Parmak began again, reaching hesitantly towards her.

“No!” she said, her vehemence resurging, “How many of the innocent died, because of people like him? And how many of those who imprisoned and tortured, who maimed and murdered, got away with it? Justice must be served!”

“This isn’t justice, it’s revenge!” Julian shouted, at the same time as Garak said, with a complete disregard for the high tension of everyone else present,

“Oh for pity’s sake I’ve already _had_ a trial!”

“Stop it!” Parmak suddenly snapped. “Stop it all of you! Have you learned nothing? Is every last one of us to be ground down? You’re right, Natima, you’re right…how many of us there were! I spent ten years in a labour camp, _ten years,_ and for what – for idle talking! The camp was full of us idle talkers – who were terrorists. It was full of harmless academics who dared speak favourably of the Vulcan republic – dissidents and spies they were! Full of engineers whose designs did not meet the State’s unrealistic expectations, full of agriculturalists whose fault it was the harvest had failed. Saboteurs! Saboteurs all! Soldiers who had dared surrender – traitors all! Peasants and students and doctors and teachers…all of Cardassia was there! All of Cardassia was bled dry by the machinery of the State.” They were all staring at him now, stunned into impassivity by this uncharacteristic outburst, and he paused, breathing heavily.

“No man, no woman, no child, was innocent in the apparatus of the State, which, above all, could not blame itself for its own failings. A guilty system recognises no innocents. We were all complicit in its evil; fathers betraying sons, wives denouncing their husbands, all because they thought it was the right thing to do. All because they were tricked into believing it was the only way they could save those they loved, the only way they could serve their people, or because they simply couldn’t stand it anymore. We were all evil, and we were also all innocent, victims of each other and the monstrous system we had created and which now over-reached us. And now you want to carry it on? The endless games of denounciation and blame, the endless bloodshed? There will be none of us left!”

“He _was_ the State,” Natima said coldly, “He was one of them. It cannot be tolerated.”

“He was one of _us,_ ” Parmak shot back, “One of us, raised and abused by the State. Should good men be forced to spend their entire lives dealing in pain and lies? What do you think happened to those who refused? Who did not meet their quotas for arrests? Natima, they were in the camps too, if they were not executed first.” His face pained and weary, he again placed a hand on her arm and this time persuaded her to lower the phaser. “Please, he’s a good man.” She looked defeated; saddened, almost.

“You know that, do you?”

“How can I? But we must have faith in something, and I’ve come to realise that the only thing worth having faith in, is not institutions, or ideas, or even gods, but people. Individual people.” She hesitated a moment longer, then seemed to reach a certain sense of equanimity.

“I suppose I’d have to shoot him through you anyway,” she said to Julian, then looked again at Garak. “I never did understand why you let me go.”

“Oh, call it sentimentality,” he said, earning himself a sharp look from Julian. Lang pocketed the phaser, and accepted Parmak’s arm, but she still stared at the two of them.

“You don’t understand him either,” she told Julian, “Look at that photograph. That young man there deserves recognition, if nothing else, of what he suffered, of how he was betrayed.” Cautiously, Julian took the photograph from Garak’s unresisting hand, and frowned.

“I don’t understand,” he said, his gaze darting from Lang’s face to Garak’s. He held it up for the others to see. It was faded almost beyond recognition, but he had identified the face in it instantly, nonetheless. “This isn’t Pruss. This is Elim.”  For the briefest moment, Garak’s face flashed on a long-remembered pain, then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, something in his expression had settled.

“Enough of this. Enough of it all. Let it go. Let’s go,” Parmak murmured to Lang, pulling her to the attic and directing a meaningful look at Julian. He and Elim watched in silence until they could be seen crossing the lawn before either of them spoke. It was Bashir who broke the silence.

“I seem to ask you this every day and never get a satisfactory answer, but I have to ask again, Elim, as your doctor and your friend, and above all as someone who loves you more than I can say: are you all right?” Garak gave a slow nod, still staring thoughtfully at the photograph.

“Julian,” Garak said at last, “I’m afraid I’ve done something a little, shall we say, impulsive.” Julian couldn’t stop himself from groaning a little.

“If this is going to result in any more people trying to kill you…” A short laugh.

“I trust not. I’ve enrolled at Tanrith, as a non-resident student, that is.” Julian blinked, nonplussed. Of all the things he expected to hear from Garak.

“What are you going to study?”

“Comparative literature.”

“Well, it certainly sounds like your thing, but, well, why? Why now? You’re always saying there’s too much to do with the rebuilding.”

“Oh that’ll go on, never fear,” Garak said, “But to answer your question: because I always wanted to. For myself. And until today, I never really had the chance.” A smile broke out across Julian’s face.

“Then I think it’s a great idea. And just think: you’ll have a head start when it come to Shakespeare.”

“Tanrith’s adapting to its’ straightened circumstances with characteristic ingenuity,” Garak added, uncharacteristically earnest, “It’s expanded it’s non-resident courses, and is forging links with off-world universities. The course allows for me to take short modules at all the great institutions; on Vulcan, Earth, Betazed…almost anywhere you could think to name.” He shifted, and continued, in a diffident tone he’d seldom heard from Garak, “Additionally, as you may recall, I’ve taken a consultant position with the civil service, specifically the foreign ministry. So it should fit in well with that, and of course, give a degree of flexibility to go with you when you want to accept assignments elsewhere in the Federation.” Julian stared. It was a compromise. It was an actual compromise to be with him, and almost instantly, the suffocating feeling he’d had lifted.

“I – that would be _wonderful,_ ” he said, and meant it, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. “It sounds like you’ve been thinking about your future a lot,” he added.

“I still have my life,” Garak said, seriously, “Against all my expectations, and against the odds, and unlike so very many others, some of them very dear to me, and despite…despite everything that’s happened and the pain it has brought, it seems to me that the only seemly thing to do is not just to survive it, but to _live_ it.” Julian made no reply for a moment; he was too busy swallowing around the lump in his throat. “I admit that I’ve not had much practice at it. But I can learn.”

“I’ll help you,” Julian murmured, and found it expedient to pull him in for a lingering kiss. Garak looked up – but it was only the stars appearing in the deepening sky. 


	39. Life and Fate

** Epilogue: Look to Windward **

**'** _Regions Caesar never knew_

_Thy posterity shall sway.’ (William Cowper, inscribed on a statue of Boadicea)_

 

When one of my colleagues suggested that I write a history, I’m afraid that I burst out laughing. But then they’ve become accustomed to the strange sense of humour of Cardassia’s most controversial author. In all seriousness though, I write novels – I write _fiction_ – and they wanted _history?_ From history’s most notorious liar? Ah, but they probably don’t remember that bit. Or I might not have told them. Or I might have lied about it. You can figure it out if you want to.

Time is like memory, a treacherous beast. Yet as I look around the University Halls, it is not only the dismal and perplexing sensation that the students are getting younger every year that disturbs me. It is the forgetting; the altering of memory, the recreation of history. The generation of youth that was born from the ashes has given rise to its own children, children who never knew the old order, who never lived in fear of the Order, of the Guls; who never hid from the bombs of the Dominion. People who never shed the blood of Bajorans, and do not carry the sins of Empire upon their shoulders; ah, but take it from an old man, the sins of the father _do_ pass down to the son, if he dares let himself forget them. You cannot forget them.

There is so much to hope for, in this new Cardassia, and yet there is still so much to fear. I see the re-imagining of the past, the re-casting of villains to victims by the embittered who cannot let go of their own pasts, and I do not recall that it was _I_ who taught the children to lie. In aeons hence, maybe nothing will be remembered of this time, except perhaps by the ancient scholars, and, their truths mutated into tales, the children will learn cautionary stories about the monster Guldokkt, and G’rrk the wolf, who knows when they tell lies…or at least, when they tell the same lie thrice. The truth of me has never been spoken or written before, or even now. The story that I write now is not the story I would have written all those years ago, or even last year; it certainly is not the story of events as they happened. It is, perhaps, the story written in my memory – but that too, has changed. If we cannot get one man right, how an entire people?

 _Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow!_ cry the children of the Cardassia, impatient with today and barely willing to acknowledge the past and all its sins. For what is in my fictions, but what Shakespeare said was life itself: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? And what shall I do but deduct them points when they do not recognise the source of the quotation?

Yet still I sit here, in my little attic office, waiting for the doctor to wing his way home from his conference, my aged fingers cold in the first autumn chill, trying to write. In all the futures I imagined for myself, I could never bring myself to believe in the one that I finally have. Ah, but then there were those who said that the Founders would join the Federation before Cardassia did. We make fools of ourselves when we think we can see the future. We cannot even see ourselves. But sometimes, we can put ourselves right.

They asked me for a history, but all I have are fictions. But then the Bajorans say that a legend is as powerful as any truth. Only scholars remember histories. But people remember stories.

 

From Elim Garak, collected works, volume III: Letters & Unfinished works.

 

**End.**

 

_‘If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten’ (Rudyard Kipling)_

_‘What can literature do against the pitiless onslaught of naked violence? Let us not forget that violence cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying’ (A. Solzhenitsyn)._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it to the end, thanks for reading this far and I hope you enjoyed it. Regardless, reviews are always appreciated. The next chapter is actually appendices and notes, if you are interested.


	40. The Answer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Appendices and notes. 
> 
> These are some notes to both explain some of the background of this fic, and also attribute quotes, chapter titles etc. I suggest you read it only if you’re trying to find an excuse to do some sort of unpleasant chore.

General Notes

The original idea for this fic occurred to me so long ago now that I can’t exactly remember how it came about, but it was an amalgam of lots of different things. The immediate spur was that I’d just had the 4 hour interrogation session known as my PhD viva, which left me feeling like my brain had just been pulled out of my nose, and set me to wondering how catatastrophically awful an interrogation session by an enemy determined to tear you to pieces might be. More generally though, a lot of things I’d been pondering over brewed themselves up into an idea, broadly divided up into two reasons:

(1) I think all G/B fans wonder about the ‘true’ reason for Garak’s exile, and, even in Andrew Robinson’s excellent _A stitch in time,_ we are still left with many unanswered questions. Garak’s undoubted patriotism always struck me as being rather at odds with the fact that he is in many ways an atypical Cardassian, who is often quite critical of the systems of power in operation on Cardassia. Why he let Natima Lang go was not, to my mind, satisfactorily explained. Granted, that was a somewhat weak episode, but it planted a seed in my mind, and it made me start totting up other discrepancies – like why he let Sisko know that Major Kira was being held by the Order in _Second Skin._ He eventually becomes a true ‘revolutionary’ – which made me question, ‘What if he always was one?’ The idea was so preposterous and yet so compelling I had to find a way to make it work. I should note though, that, in the many re-writings of this fic, I wrote Garak as everything from ‘True Order agent’ to ‘True Dissident’ and everything else in between.

(2) Readers may notice a superficial similarity between the Tanrith Four and the Cambridge Five (Cambridge Spy Ring): a ring of spies recruited by the Soviets at Cambridge University in the UK in the 1930s, who fooled the British authorities for quite some time as to their defection. Only four members are categorically known; the identity of the ‘fifth man’ is still subject to speculation. Frankly, I personally find spy stories, both fact and fiction, rather dull, so I did not really research this much for my story. I only took the idea that if Tain had been in charge of intelligence services in the UK at the time, they might not have got away with it for so long.

The portrayal of the Cardassian Empire in the Star Trek canon is itself somewhat ambiguous: the impression given is that of the Roman Empire – and Garak himself often speaks of the Empire in terms that suggests a formerly glorious Empire now in decline, riddled with corruption and incompetence, but once the seat of great works of culture, even though it was also a brutally expansionist, conquering empire capable of great cruelty. Terms such as ‘Legate’ are directly lifted from the Roman Empire (although note ‘Archon’ is from the Greek). The exact division of power is not clear: the military appears to be in charge, with the Obsidian Order a parallel power structure, and the civilian Detapa Council rather powerless, at least at the start. The views we get of Cardassia Prime, with the striking viewscreens, reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’, speak of a totalitarian regime, with a fetishism of military power, a justice system that recognises no innocents, labour camps for punishment, and the Stasi-like Obsidian Order infiltrating into every corner of life. I have portrayed it broadly along those lines, with particular reference to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

In his novel _Life and Fate,_ Vasily Grossman questions whether the innate human desire for freedom can overcome totalitarianism, a system incapable of existing without violence, which it achieves largely through coupling obedience to the human instinct for self-preservation expressed at the level of the State or national grouping – at a level construed, in whatever form, as the greater good. He notes that almost all human constructs of the greater good – even those genuinely well-intentioned, such as Christianity – end up committing great evils, but that small acts of individual human kindness argue against the apparent universality of human evil. Dr Parmak is the one who articulates this view most particularly, but Julian is the one who perhaps personifies it the most.

I always found it poignant that Cardassia seemed to be on the road to democratic reform, what with the Detapa Council, the civilians, taking control as the military grows weaker and the Order is destroyed, only for it to be thrown back into totalitarianism – this time as a subject stateof a more powerful empire than itself when Dukat sells them out to the Dominion. History might have taken a very different and less bloody path. Cardassia in fact, never does quite get her full revolution – she is destroyed and can only be rebuilt from the ground up, although we are given the impression that what will be rebuilt will not be the same as what went before.

The other major idea was of course that when Garak said that the implant was to make him to immune to pain, we didn’t take the correct meaning from it. I thought that it could work equally well for a sense of empathic pain as well as physical pain. This came to me as I tried to write Tain – a powerful but utterly chilling character to write. Tain in the series remains an utter cipher, which I strove to maintain here. The way he talks is frequently in an almost grandfatherly style, but there’s real menace behind it, and above all, his is a position that demands absolute control over everyone and everything. I quite disturbed myself writing that bit about the implant.

I should stress however, that I do not seek to excuse Garak’s participation in torture, a moral evil without justification. Excuses are not the same as reasons, however, and reasons must be found to explain such acts in order to prevent them from being repeated. I thoroughly recommend Philip Zimbardo’s book, _The Lucifer Effect: How good people turn evil,_ for a compelling and often disturbing account of how our moral compasses are not as fixed as we would like to suppose, and how the mass pressure of society can be brought to bear such that horrific acts can be committed routinely by ordinary people – largely in the name of that ‘greater good.’

 

Structure

I deliberately opted for a complicated point of view, switching back and forth between Julian in the present, and Garak in the past, intercut with Garak in the present thinking about the past at the end of every part, playing around with first and third person as well to make past events seem more present. How successful this was is for the reader to decide! It was hellish to write, I can tell you that. A few things inspired this: Andrew Robinson raises the intriguing possibility of Cardassian memory being ‘non-linear’ in _A stitch in time_ (which also led me onto the idea of Odeyn Syndrome). More tantalising to me though, was Garak’s description of _The Never-ending Sacrifice:_ ‘The repetitive epic is the most elegant form in Cardassian literature.’ Something with ‘repetitive’ in the description doesn’t _sound_ that exciting, but I can’t help but feel that a story structure with elements that continuously repeat and recycle could be a fascinating one if done well. So I tried to write Garak’s life as a repeating cycle with variations, one that is threatening to break down as he tries to reconcile the contradictions in it as he truly begins to question his past.

It is notable as well, of course, that Garak, like most people, is largely swept along by the current of history rather than actually effecting any great change in it himself. I opened the possibility of him doing so by making him an author; one of Garak’s great talents is with words, and words can change a lot that actions alone may fail to achieve.

Specific Notes

Ch.1

“Revolutionary Etude:” The title is taken from the piano piece of the same name, Étude Op. 10, No. 12 in C minor, by the Romantic composer Chopin. It is also known as the “Étude on the Bombardment of Warsaw,” and was written around 1831, at the same time as the November Uprising. This was an armed rebellion in the heartland of partitioned Poland against the Russian Empire, that ultimately failed. Reportedly Chopin, who was Polish, wrote the piece in response to this event, although I don’t know what evidence there is for that. An “etude”, or study, is a piece designed to test and develop a particular technical skill, although Chopin’s may be considered to be the first that were elevated into an actual art form. The analogy, of course, is that Tain is purporting to test Garak’s skill – but it’s not his skill that he doubts.

Ch.2

Garak’s recalled quote is, of course, from ‘The Wire’ (and yes, it is slightly incorrectly recalled).

Ch.3

 

Tain’s reference to the way their Hebitian forebears hunted is in fact broadly how human hunter-gatherers are thought to have evolved: distance-running in the heat of the African savannah until your prey gave up from exhaustion before you did. Notably peoples who still hunt this way do tend to have a strong empathy with their prey. Cardassians seem to me to be far too bulky to be built for distance running, but they like the heat, so I imagine they would employ a slower tracking-plus-ambush method.

I was never quite sure how realistic it was to portray systematic torture as a means of getting _information_ in the _Star Trek_ universe – given that it is _not_ a reliable means of obtaining information. It is, however, used as part of a system of terror to control populations. I deliberately don’t go into many details – apart from the fact that it’s simply unnecessarily unpleasant to do so, leaving it to the imagination produces scarier results in the mind of the reader. I would imagine that they have fancy technology, but for example Ian Cobain in _Cruel Brittania, a secret history of torture,_ documents that the British developed and refined the so-called ‘Five Techniques’, which are extremely common, particularly if you want to be doing something you think you can argue is not really torture, and that leaves no marks. These are sleep deprivation, ‘stress’ positions, ‘restriction’ of diet (starvation), sensory deprivation (usually hooding) and white noise.

Ch.7

Kirsk and Tanrith universities are very loosely modelled on Oxford and Cambridge universities, respectively.

Ch.8

Odo’s observation about Garak’s sincerity (and then lack thereof) to Tain was something that I found particularly striking even the first time I saw it, and ultimately set my decision for exactly how Garak had ‘betrayed’ Tain.

Ch.17

Believe it or not, Garak and Pruss’ exploration through the college attic is based on a little adventure I had with a friend of mine at university, and yes, there was a scale model of the building we were standing in hidden away up there. And yes, I did fall into a bath when I went through the door on the other side!

Ch.18

See the general introduction for where I got the idea for Odeyn syndrome from.

Ch.19

I suggest here that Garak developed a taste for masochism, which seems to me a likely side-effect of having an implant in your head that releases loads of endorphins every time you experience pain.

I also quote Garak from _Improbable Cause_ in this section.

Ch.22

Contains quotes from _In Purgatory’s Shadow_ here

Ch.26

I decided to go with Garak’s story about sparing the children in _The Wire,_ but his reasons for doing so are rather ambiguous and not solely motivated by compassion.

Ch.28

Garak’s memory structure is really beginning to break down by this point, which I hope comes across. Unlike Pruss, he’s experienced too much to believe in the idealism he wants to.

Ch.30

Garak describes himself as an expert at explosives, which you would not necessarily expect for someone who is usually so subtle – but the incidents he tallies up (which I had tallied up myself beforehand) do indicate a certain talent in this area.

You will note that in addition to going with Garak’s sparing the children story in _The Wire,_ I also went with his blowing up the shuttle story – he does say that _all_ the stories were true, after all.

Contains a quote by Odo from _In Purgatory’s Shadow_ – Odo is right, Garak is not capable of seeing, or at least of acknowledging, Tain as his enemy.

Those ‘other five’ proteges of Tain Garak refers to I take to be the ones that Tain has assassinated in _Improbable Cause,_ which Garak would be pleased about if Tain hadn’t also tried to kill him.

Ch.31

I’m not sure where all the furniture reversal came from, except a literal interpretation of Garak’s remark that Tain turned him into a mirror image of himself. I regard Tain as something of a psyhological assassin – someone who will rearrange all your mental furniture when you’re not looking.

Ch.32

Tain is right in a sense – Garak at this point doesn’t know what to believe in. I think if the dissidents he associated with had had a realistic and inclusive view of a future Cardassia, he might have been more fully persuaded to their cause.

Ch.33

Garak said earlier in the story that the best lie you can tell is the one you get other people to tell for you: Julian is in a sense doing this, by presenting information and testimony in such a way that the court fills in their own false interpretation of the events.

Ch.25

I originally had Julian discover that Untar was Garak’s half-uncle at this point, thus giving a clue as to where Tain came from – but in the end I scrapped it as contrived and irrelevant. I that decided I preferred for him to remain a complete cipher, and for any clue to his background to have been destroyed. We already have one link to the present – through Garak. Why Tain let Garak and Mila live will always remain a question – was there any sentiment there at all, or did he just see a promising tool that he could shape to his own use?

Ch.36

Garak has reconnected his empathy to his imagination here, through Pruss.

Ch.38

Parmak’s comment about good men being forced to deal in pain and lies is inspired from a line in Gene Wolfe’s _Book of the New Sun_ , from Severian the Torturer, and his comment about a guilty system recognising no innocents is from _The player of games,_ by Iain M Banks.

Ch.39

The Shakespeare Garak quotes from is of course _Macbeth._

‘We can put ourselves right’ is a paraphrase from Traudl Junge’s _Until the Final Hour._ She was one of Hitler’s secretaries.

I debated a long time whether to put this epilogue in, but in the end decided to for several reason: firstly, to complete the circle of the ‘repetitive epic’ and Garak’s memories by putting his future self in as well; secondly, to demonstrate that Garak has found a better way to use his tall stories to serve the State and thirdly; because the impression is given that Garak has re-written this story several times, you still don’t know if it’s the ‘truth’ or not ;)

 

Part Headings

All these are taken from the titles of Iain M Banks’ series of science fiction novels, which, if you haven’t read, you should J

 

Chapter Headings

I took these from a mixture of song titles (just because I liked them, not particularly because the songs themselves are necessarily relevant), quotes from Garak and a few other people, and a few other random things. For the sake of copyright and completeness, they are listed below:

Ch.1: An Everyday Coincidence (taken from Garak’s quote, “I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don’t _trust_ coincidences.”) Julian should perhaps not have trusted this coincidence.

Ch.2: Waiting Phase I (a song title by Porcupine Tree)

Ch.3: Barbarism begins at home (a song title by The Smiths)

Ch.4: Essence of Intellect (taken from Garak’s quote, “Ah, an open mind; the essence of intellect,” the first time he meets Julian, in Past Prologue.

Ch.5: An intelligence agent _has_ no ego (taken from Garak’s quote to Julian in Our Man Bashir).

Ch.6: The Boy with the Thorn in his Side (a song title by The Smiths)

Ch.7: A skill like any other (“lying is a skill like any other, and if you want to maintain it to a level of excellence, you have to practice constantly” – that utterly hilarious scene in _In Purgatory’s Shadow_ where Garak tries to convince Worf that he wants to join Starfleet).

Ch.8: Private Investigations (a song title by Dire Straits)

Ch.9: Let the Right One In (a song title by The Smiths, and later a film. The reference to choosing the right one to let into your affections I found particularly apt)

Ch.10: Attention to Detail (Garak describes this as a single characteristic you would attribute to Cardassians during _Cardassians_ )

Ch.11: They suffocate at night (a song title by Pulp)

Ch.12: Rainbow Allegiance (my own reference)

Ch.13: False Flag (originally a naval concept whereby your ship flies a flag not corresponding to your true country as a ruse before engaging in battle. It has subsequently been employed in several military, paramilitary and espionage situations, including in peacetime. In espionage the term generally describes the recruiting of agents by operatives posing as representatives of a cause the prospective agents are sympathetic to).

Ch.14: Great Expectations (obviously the book by Charles Dickens, but also a song title by Porcupine Tree)

Ch.15: The hand that rocks the cradle (a song title by The Smiths, referencing sinister parental control)

Ch.16: Family is everything (“On Cardassia, family is everything” – avowed by Kotan Pa’dar during _Cardassians_ ).

Ch.17: Rock of Eye (a curious term referencing to the experienced tailor’s ability to intuitively match the item to the wearer, trusting the eye’s guesswork over more precise methods).

Ch.18: Safe in Mind (a song title by Unkle)

Ch.19: Harm of Will (a song title by Bjork)

Ch.20: How soon is now? (a song title by The Smiths)

Ch.21: Negative Capability (this is a term used by Keats to describe Shakespeare’s elusiveness as a person – all we really know of the man’s character is what he transposed into his characters: “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”)

Ch.22: The most valuable lesson (this and Ch.22 are from Garak’s famous quote, “Let this be a lesson to you doctor, perhaps the most valuable one I can teach you: sentiment is the greatest weakness”: _In Purgatory’s Shadow)._

Ch.23: The greatest weakness

Ch.24: Neural Rust (from a song title by Porcupine Tree)

Ch.25 Unfinished Sympathy (from a song title by Massive Attack)

Ch.26: Suffer Little Children (from a song title by The Smiths, in turn from a Biblical reference)

Ch.27: When Things Explode (from a song title by Unkle)

Ch.28: The lovers are losing (from a song title by Keane)

Ch.29: Holding the moth (from a song title by Underworld)

Ch.30: Sins of the father (a Biblical reference – are the sins of the father borne by the son? A reference to Rikesh and his father as well as Garak and Tain)

Ch.31: A mirror image of himself (Garak, from _In Purgatory’s Shadow,_ “All my life I’ve let that man mould me, turn me into a mirror image of himself.”)

Ch.32: Eye of the Beholder (Garak, from _Second Skin,_ “Treason, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” I found this interesting – Entek, of the Order, accuses Garak of treason in helping Kira and the dissident Ghemor escape, but apparently Garak doesn’t see it that way)

Ch.33: Hamlet of Kings (from a music title by The Orb)

Ch.34: Postcards from a Young Man (from a song title by the Manic Street Preachers).

Ch.35: In our selves, not in our stars (“the fault lies in our selves, not in our stars”, Garak is of course quoting from Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare, in _The Die is Cast_ ).

Ch.36: Remember me lover (from a song title by Porcupine Tree)

Ch.37: Know where to run (from a music title by Orbital)

Ch.38: To thine own self be true (Shakespeare again, Garak will be annoyed; “This above all: to thine own self be true”, from Hamlet).

Ch.39: Life and Fate (title of a novel by Vasily Grossman, distinguished as the only book to have ever been arrested).

Ch.40: The Answer (from a song title by Unkle).

 


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